The president in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land.

But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land?

The idea is strange to us.

Every part of  this earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow.

All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We are a part of this earth and it is a part of us.

The perfume flowers are our sisters.

The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers.

Each ghostly reflection in the clear waters of the lake tells of memories of events in the life of my people.

The water’s murmurs are the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers are our brothers. They carry our canoes and feed our children.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us.

That the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

The wind, which gave our father his first breath, also receives his last sigh.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.

All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.

Your destiny is a mystery to us.

What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered?

What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men?

And the view of the ripe hills are blotted by talking wires?

The end of living and the beginning of survival!

When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness, and his memories are only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here?

Will there be any spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves his mother’s heartbeat.

So, if we sell you our land love it as we have loved it.

Care for it as we have cared for it.

Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it.

Preserve the land for all children and love it as god loves us all.

One thing we know: there is only one god.

No man, be he red man or white man, can be apart. We are brothers after all.

From The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

The animal envoys of the unseen power no longer serve as in primeval times to teach and to guide mankind.

Bears, lions, elephants and gazelles are in cages in our zoos.

Man is no longer the new comer in a world of unexplored plains and forests. And our immediate neighbors are not wild beasts, but other human beings contending for goods and space on a planet that is whirling without end around the fireball of a star.

Neither in body nor in mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races of the Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and life ways we, nevertheless, owe the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds.

Memories of their animal envoys still must sleep somehow within us, for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness.

They wake in terror to thunder!

And again they wake with a sense of recognition when we enter anyone of those great painted caves.

Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those caves descended in their trances,

the same must lie within ourselves nightly visited in sleep.