In his essay “Native American Attitudes toward the Environment,” Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday declares that an American Indian relationship toward the land “proceeds from a racial or cultural experience” (“Native” 80), and in the essay “An American Land Ethic,” he recalls finishing writing The Way to Rainy Mountain, insisting that in the person of “Ko-sahn and in her people we have always had the example of a deep, ethical regard for the land” (Man 105). In the words of the Laguna Pueblo author Paula Gunn Allen: “We are the land . . . that is the fundamental idea embedded...

Representations of American Indians as environmentalists, as keepers of the land, or as worshipers of a Mother Earth goddess are ubiquitous. These sometimes intricately constructed environmental attitudes attributed to American Indians, moreover, often provide a symbolic, if not a literal, means for both American Indians and non-Indians to articulate an alternative response to the pervasive Western, techno-industrial attitudes toward and treatment of the land. Joseph Backus maintains that “non-Indian Americans are quick to attribute to the traditional Indian what seems an ideal kind of existence.” According to this stereotype, writes Backus, “the peoples native to this [Western] hemisphere were able...

In the concluding essay of his collection Mixedblood Messages, “ ‘Everywhere There Was Life,’ ” Louis Owens addresses the romantic stereotype of the ecological Indian: “It has long been fashionable . . . to speak and write of American Indians as something like genetically predetermined environmentalists. . . . In the past few years, however, a group of brave and daring revisionist cultural historians have sought to show this environmentalist image for what they think it is: historically and culturally inaccurate romanticism” (Mixedblood 220). One of the iconoclasts is Shepard Krech III, a historian who challenges the notion of American...

Luther Standing Bear receives no mention in Sam Gill’s discussion of the Mother Earth phenomenon in America, even though this Lakota writer refers explicitly to “Mother Earth” throughout his 1933 book Land of the Spotted Eagle. Indeed, by recounting his experiences as a boy and a young man, Standing Bear in this autobiographical work describes the pre-twentieth-century culture of the Lakotas for whom, according to the author, Mother Earth played a crucial role. Insofar as Standing Bear wrote his book as an adult in the first third of the twentieth century, the experiences off the reservation of his youth certainly...

After his return to Los Angeles from South Dakota in 1931, Luther Standing Bear quickly wrote an essay for the magazine American Mercury and evidently then turned immediately to writing his book Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933). At roughly the same time, Osage writer John Joseph Mathews returned from Los Angeles to his former home on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. He had been “involved with a real estate business” (Wilson, “Osage” 272), but he returned to Pawhuska in 1929, and in 1932 he had his cabin built on the ridges. Born in 1896, Mathews is essentially a generation...

By the time John Joseph Mathews published the autobiographical work Talking to the Moon (1945), he had had his first novel republished as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, he enjoyed the widespread recognition that such a publication affords, and he had written and published a second novel. Mathews writes about the Osages in and around Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in his first book, Wah’Kon-Tah (1932), and in his second, the semiautobiographical Sundown (1934), he depicts the life of a mixed-blood Osage man as he attends college, participates as a pilot in World War I, and attempts to reject his Osage heritage. Similarly, by the...

In her novel Four Souls (2004) Louise Erdrich picks up where the earlier novel Tracks ends, with Fleur’s leaving her deforested home. The opening passage of the more recent book includes a reference to the great trees that go into the building of rich people’s homes: “all this made of wood, fine-grained, very old-grown, quartersawn oak that still in its season and for many years after would exude beads of thin sap—as though recalling growth and life on the land belonging to Fleur Pillager and the shores of Matchimanito, beyond” (Erdrich, Four 9). In a similar spirit, Louis Owens...

At roughly the same time Owens’s character Tom Joseph climbs into Amel’s truck for a ride home to Forks at the beginning of Wolfsong, N. Scott Momaday, according to his own recollection in an essay called “Navajo Place Names,” picks up a hitchhiker on his way between Gallup, New Mexico, and Kayenta, Arizona, to the northwest. As they drive along, Momaday discovers that this hitchhiker, a young Navajo man, knows the Navajo names for the places they see as they drive. Momaday remembers his amazement at his traveling companion’s knowledge: “He was eminently familiar with the places that defined him.”...

In the same year that N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn, 1969, Vine Deloria Jr. published his first and perhaps still best-known book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. He opens his manifesto by challenging easy stereotypes, declaring that the mainstream American public feels that it knows all about the American Indian: “People can tell just by looking at us what we want, what should be done to help us, how we feel, and what a ‘real’ Indian is really like” (Custer 1). A few pages later he writes sardonically...

After his keynote address at a conference in Eugene, Oregon, in May 1997, Gerald Vizenor was asked by a member of the audience to recommend what one might do in order to understand his writings. The lecturer by the window chuckled spontaneously, paused a moment, then said “Read my haiku.” Everything he had written, he said, could probably be compacted into a haiku. Perhaps into this one from “Seasons in Santa Fe”:

mountain snow

warblers search the apricots

no apologies. (74)

But I don’t trust the trickster lecturer on this point. Rather—just as the “salamander earth must hear many...

Early in Linda Hogan’s novel Power (1998), the sixteen-year-old narrator, Omishto, whose name means “One Who Watches,” remembers the panther: “I heard one of those gold-colored panthers once. Its cry was so loud I thought it could bring down the world. But now the world’s come down without a cry” (15). Omishto’s thought, as she expresses it here, identifies a premise of the novel: through their mistreatment of the landscape humans have broken a covenant with the earth and have thus diminished it, have brought it down. Now, by means of a sort of apprenticeship with her friend and mentor...

In 1999 a group of Makah whalers killed their first gray whale in some seventy years, and in so doing, they reestablished or reinitiated a long dormant tribal tradition. Members of the hunting party were from traditional whaling families among the Makah Nation in extreme north-western Washington State who, despite historical family connections, had to earn the right to be a part of the hunting party and actually hunt the whale. Basing their canoe and harpoon designs on artifacts collected in the museum on the Makah reservation in Neah Bay, Washington, they built their own canoes, fashioned their own harpoons...