Indigenous Land Rights Activist Winona LaDuke to speak in Mountain View

Indigenous Land Rights Activist Winona LaDuke to speak in Mountain View on Tuesday, March 20

Native American environmentalist to share stories of indigenous land management practices and how they are informing current land stewardship and conservation

(Palo Alto, Calif.) — The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) will host nationally-recognized Native activist and author Winona LaDuke for a lecture on the history of Native American land rights, indigenous land stewardship practices, and how we can move the country towards an economy that will support the “Seventh Generation.” The lecture will be at 8 PM, Tuesday March 20th at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts as part of POST’s annual Wallace Stegner Lectures. Tickets are on sale at openspacetrust.org/lectures with student discounts available.

Winona LaDuke is a Native American environmentalist and the executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native American environmental advocacy organization. Honor the Earth held several events to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their efforts to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline project, which would jeopardize the tribe’s water resources. She is known for her work on Native American tribal land claims and preservation and sustainable development. She founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project to help recover the ancestral lands of Native Americans by the U.S. government. She has gathered many native environmentalist groups together to push for environmental regulations, strengthening renewable energy and food systems in the tribal areas.

Winona will be introduced by Valentin Lopez, President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust (AMLT), which works to research and implement stewardship projects based in traditional ecological knowledge, in partnership with many agencies and nonprofits throughout the area. The Amah Mutsun Tribe represents descendants of over 20 politically distinct peoples from the Bay Area. The traditional territories include portions of San Benito, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. AMLT was recently granted a groundbreaking cultural conservation easement atop Mount Umunhum, part of the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve which is managed by MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District. Winona is the last of three speakers to participate in this year’s Wallace Stegner Lectures. She is preceded by former Obama Administration EPA Chief Gina McCarthy on February 13th, and travel author and scientist Bill Bryson who spoke at a sold-out lecture on January 30th.

About the Wallace Stegner Lectures

POST’s Wallace Stegner Lectures, now in its 25th year, pays tribute to the conservation legacy of the late writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner — Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Stanford University professor and ardent spokesman for the West’s wild places. The late Ambassador Laurence W. Bill Lane and his late wife, Jean, sponsored the Wallace Stegner Lectures from their inception in 1993 and have endowed the series in perpetuity through The Bill and Jean Lane Endowment.

Additional series sponsorship is provided by Sand Hill Global Advisors, Noble & Lorraine Hancock, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Foundation, Risk Strategies Company, Fenwick and West LLP, Pie Ranch and Alex Wang.

Media sponsorship is provided by Embarcadero Media, publishers of Palo Alto Weekly, Mountain View Voice, The Almanac and Palo Alto Online.

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About Peninsula Open Space Trust

POST protects open space, farms and parkland for communities in and around Silicon Valley. As a private nonprofit land trust, POST has been responsible for saving more than 75,500 acres over the last 40 years. POST works with private landowners and public agencies to connect people and nature for the benefit of all. www.openspacetrust.org