Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
All this country
When this wind blow you can feel it.
Same for country . . .
You feel it.
You can look,
But feeling . . .
That make you.
Feeling make you,
Out there in open space.
He coming through your body.
Look while he blow and feel with your body . . .
Because tree just about your brother or father . . .
And tree is watching you.
Earth . . .
Like your father or brother or mother,
Because you born from earth.
You got to come back to earth.
When you dead . . .
You'll come back to earth.
Maybe little while yet . . .
Then you'll come to earth.
That's your bone,
Your blood.
It's in this earth,
Same for tree.
Gregory Cajete, a Native American educator and academic, offers a similar story.
His concern is with education as the vehicle for rearticulating the intimate relationship
of the American Indian to the environment, to cultural and physical survival, and
to cultural identity and purpose. He writes that thinking, acting and working were
traditionally played out through nature, expressed in art and through work, in hunting
and respect for those animals who give their lives so human persons can live. Forests
and ravens should be respected because they sustain human culture and spirituality
(Nelson, 1986). Respect is again the key to life and creation. 'Indigenous people',
Cajete writes (1999: 11), 'felt responsibility not only for themselves, but also for the
entire world around them. The world renewal ceremonies conducted by all indigenous
people are reflections of this deep ecological sensibility and responsibility.' Traditional,
invariably local, ecological knowledge maintained physical as well as spiritual health
through knowledge of foods, plants and medicinal herbs. Ill health grew when
indigenous peoples took to eating the highly processed and refined Western foods,
when their own gardens, like their culture, ceased to be nurtured, causing their
nutritional and medical knowledge to wither and almost die. Gardens are important
particularly to the Pueblos of New Mexico. Cajete continues:
The garden becomes not only a place to watch plants grow, but a direct way
for young people to participate in the greater circle of life. As young people
 
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