Native Americans and the Environment: A Survey of Twentieth-Century Issues

Native Americans have long had an immediate relationship with their physical environments. At contact most lived in relatively small units close to the earth, cognizant of its rhythms and resources. They defined themselves by the land, by the sacred places that bounded and shaped their world. They recognized a unity in their physical and spiritual universes, the union of natural and supernatural. Their origin cycles, oral traditions, and cosmologies connected them with all animate and inanimate beings, past and present.