Nature 14

Nothing the Great Mystery placed in the land of the Indian pleased the white man, and nothing escaped his transforming hand. Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life – that to him is an “unbroken wilderness”.

First People: Chief Luther Standing Bear

Chief Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939) was a chief of the Oglala Lakota (or Oglala Sioux), author and philosopher. He contributed to our understanding of indigenous cultures as holistic and respectful of nature.

It was not only in relation to the Americas, from where this quote comes, that Europeans developed the idea of nature as an unknown, and of people and ways of life as wild. This quote suggests that this was by no means the case for the Lakota Sioux, to which Standing Bear belonged. Standing Bear continued: 'He knew that a man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature's softening influence’ (ibid.). As Paula Gunn Allen (1979, quoted in Booth 2003) put it: ‘The land [nature] is a part of ourselves.’

*Annie L. Booth (2003): We are the Land: Native American Views of Nature. In: Selin H. (eds) Nature Across Cultures. Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht.

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