Winona LaDuke (born 1959) is a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the United States Green Party, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. In the 2004 election, however, she endorsed the Democratic candidate John Kerry. In the 2008 presidential election, LaDuke endorsed the Democrat Barack Obama.

She is currently the executive director of both Honor the Earth and White Earth Land Recovery Project, which she founded.

LaDuke was born in Los Angeles, California, to Vincent and Betty LaDuke. Her father was Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) from Minnesota. He was an actor with supporting roles in Western movies, an activist, a writer, and at the end of his life, a spiritual guru under the name Sun Bear. Her mother was a Jewish artist, who was an art professor at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. She raised LaDuke in Ashland, Oregon.

After graduating from Harvard in 1982 with a degree in rural economic development, LaDuke became principal of the high school on the Anishinaabe White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. She completed an M.A. in Community Economic Development at Antioch University.

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.

In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.