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Climbing the World Tree: Native American Spirituality and the Natural World

In the autobiography of John Fire Lame Deer, holy man of the Lakota Sioux, he says, "A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives" (108). To the European mind, his advice might seem a little strange and hard to follow, for the word ‘nature' often refers to that which is separate from what constitutes man and civilization. But to Lame Deer and his people, as well as the majority of the indigenous societies of North America, ‘nature' included not only humankind but all of creation; the natural world is the sacred whole which everything that exists is born from. Historically, there were nine basic culture areas of indigenous North Americans, mostly separated by region, as would follow from climate and adaptation. These were all very different from each other, but they shared the same belief that the......

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Approximate Word Count: 1544
Approximate Pages: 7 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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