This exploration of Native American traditions proposes a diagnosis for the disconnect modern humans experience from nature and considers traditional Native practices as potential therapy people might take up to heal the rift. The Native American “way of being in the world” – what Luther Standing Bear calls “Indian mind” and Joseph Couture refers to as coming to “‘know’ as an Indian knows, to ‘see’ as an Indian sees”, is in my view, a kind of “nature consciousness,” an elemental component of Native American religions. Nature consciousness embraces the whole of the environment and nature, and everything in it, in one community of life.

For Native American author and religious scholar Vine Deloria Jr. “tribal religions have a natural affinity with living creatures in a fellowship of life.” The Hopi, for example, “revere not only the lands on which they live but the animals with which they have a particular relationship.” (88) The great disconnect, or alienation, of whites from nature, Deloria points out, has its fountainhead in the way Christians interpret the story in Genesis, with man reigning supreme over all other creatures. Indian tribes, on the other hand, view all living beings as sentient. Animals are “people” in the same way that human beings are people. Plains Indians considered the buffalo as a people, and Northwest Coast Indians regarded the salmon as a people. This “recognition of the creatureness of all creation,” an attitude that opens the door to relatedness with every part of creation, is what Indians have that Westerners lack. For some tribes this relatedness even extends to plants, rocks, and natural phenomena considered by Westerners inanimate. Deloria quotes Walking Buffalo, a Stoney Indian from Canada:

Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they’ll talk to you if you listen…I have learned a lot from trees; sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit.[…]

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