Gordon Sturrock: Returning to American Indian Ways of Democracy and Ecology!

Those of us whose roots lie in Europe, Africa or Asia are new arrivals to this American land. Our connections are to other places, other soils. Some of us may have some Indian blood, but only those whose forefathers came here so long ago that they have no ancestral memory of anywhere else on the globe can truly said to belong to the land we now all live upon. Unfortunately, we have forgotten this, or never knew it. In their pride and arrogance, most of our white ancestors ignored this tie to the land, a tie that native Americans have felt so deeply that it seems almost part of their physical being. Our grandfathers may once have felt this way about the lands from which they came - from County Cork or Manchester, from Senegal or Canton - but nothing like what American Indians clearly feel for theirs, for among native Americans there is a mystical element that few Westerners can claim to experience, but it is present in the rituals, the teachings, the spirit of American Indian ways. If we could only recapture that spirit! For our latecomers' society is destroying the Earth that American Indians treasured and preserved for thousands of years. The survival of all life on the planet may indeed depend on our regaining it.
In his classic history of Indian law, In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided, Walter Echo-Hawk discusses the modern struggle of Indians to preserve the sanctity of their ancient sacred sites. That the land was held sacred was true throughout the Americas. One scholar tells us, for example, about the highlands of central Mexico, where the most important sites had a spiritual meaning accumulated over centuries of occupation: The hill named Huizachtlan, the great urban pyramid of Tenochtitlan, the ritual Hill of Tetzcotzingo, and the shrines upon the heights of Mt Tlaloc and at Pantitlan in Lake Tezcotzingo, and the shrines upon the heights of Mt Tlaloc and at Pantitlan in Lake Tetzcoco were principal icons of Aztec sacred geography, designed to manifest the inherent power of things seen and unseen in the natural environment. (Richard Townsend, The Aztecs)