Wakérakats:te Louise Herne

Wakérakats:te Louise Herne is a traditionalist leader and consistent innovator who illuminates the journey of her people to regenerate love for themselves, their children, and their
ancestral culture.

Her lifelong home community is the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation, which straddles the US-Canadian border on the St. Lawrence River. A Bear Clan Mother in the traditional Longhouse, she pulls the threads of ancient matrilineal knowledge from Sky Woman’s original legacy to the present. Louise activates ceremony as a way of being and knowing over the life course—truly as a pathway away from violence and abuse, and from illness to health. For over a decade, she has led young people and their relations through Ohero:kon, a four-year rite of passage to contemplate and steadily incorporate Haudenosaunee values that will guide them as adults. Through her Moon Lodge Society, Louise opens sacred space linked to natural cycles for girls and women, a place where
prophetic dreams are shared and made real.

Louise brings her knowledge and traditional standing in the institution of Mother Law to help develop a responsible future for our people. Always starting from a place of perpetual gratitude, a foundational Longhouse teaching, she has co-created a renewed Haudenosaunee narrative for resilience and resistance. Louise embodies the head Corn Mother spirit of keeping her hand on the heart of her people.

Louise received an honorary degree of doctor of humane letters from the State University of New York in 2017.