"The Land is Holy"

Ho! Great Spirit, Grandfather, you have made everything and are in everything. You sustain everything, guide everything, provide everything and protect everything, because everything belongs to you. I am weak, poor and lowly, nevertheless, help me to care, in appreciation and gratitude to you and for everything. I love the stars, the sun and the moon, and I thank you for our beautiful mother, the Earth, whose many breasts nourish the fish, the fowls and the animals, too. May I never deceive Mother Earth; may I never deceive my people; may I never deceive myself, and above all may I never deceive you. - Sioux Prayer

In words like these, indigenous people reveal their faith in the wisdom of creation, the wonderfully balanced and complex eco-system of our planet. Their creation-centred values contrast sharply with our frontier mentality which says that pushing back the wilderness, cultivating the soil, populating the land and building an industrial/technological way of life is best.

Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) wrote of the United States in 1831: "The Americans themselves never think about the wilds, they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature... their eyes are fixed upon another sight, they march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes and subduing nature."

Contrast that with the words of Native people in Canada.

"The land our ancestors walked on is holy. That is why it hurts me to see the lands ruined by such things as logging. I just became a grandmother not too long ago and I would like my children to live off the land that God has put us on... our great Creator." (Lily Bell, Haida woman from the Queen Charlotte Islands).

"Every time the white people come to our land and start tearing up the land, I feel as if they are cutting our own flesh because that is the way we feel about our land. It is our flesh." (Georgina Tobac, Fort Good Hope, N.W.T.)

"Do the white people have a right to ask us to give up this beautiful land of ours? Do they have a right to spoil our land and destroy our wild game for their benefit? We live peacefully in harmony with nature here in Old Crow. You won't find very many places like this left in this world." (Alice Frost, Old Crow, The Yukon)

Traditionally there was no private ownership of land among Native people. They have always believed that all members of a community have the right to use it but that also means that the land cannot be bought or sold or used for the sole gain of one person or one group.

Land was given to Native people by their God, the Creator. It is their life. Their religion, culture, economy, experience and identity are centred in the land and its resources.

So principles of equality and the welfare of the group and community are still strong today. "No one can decide for another person. Everyone has to get involved in the discussion and the decision is made by everyone," says George Barnaby, a former vice-president of the Dene Nation. No Native person would knowingly damage the environment because it belongs to no one person, it is shared.

These values - the integration of creation, the land as security, pride and self-respect, the social and political values of community and sharing, the respect for history and elders, the mystical relationship between creation, Creator and all life - are not romantic ideals. They are tested and found essential to survival.

Startling similarities are to be found in values of Native people and the values set out in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. It was as if, one Catholic missionary once said, the Native people and the Children of Israel had travelled the same path and found that it was good.