Robin Wall Kimmerer

where “green” means an advertising slogan, not a meadow.

I can’t return salmon to the river, and my neighbors would raise the alarm if I set fire to my yard to produce pasture for elk.

use your gifts and dreams for good,” the same instructions we all carry

Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling.

Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected.

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

bauble of colorful “folklore

Most of my students have never heard the origin story of this land where they were born,

It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land

In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom