Real People of Turtle Island

The author explores what we did, what we lost, and what we might gain in reviewing our conquest of the Native Americans and nature and realizing the great tragedy in the European obsession with material acquisitions and total ignorance of the superior spirituality and democracy of the American Natives. In our conquest, we also began the killing of the natural in favor of the artificial. We are now, and will continue, to pay a huge price for our cultural and spiritual ignorance and our obsession with materiality based on what we claimed was "manifest destiny." These are some very major flaws in our cultural-religious-and-philosophical framework, and we can sense the loss of balance and harmony that was so central to the existence of the Natives in America. They lived in the mythic land of Turtle Island, and had a peaceful and spiritual existence, as compared to what we now have. It was based on the essence of spiritual nature and mother earth, and we have substituted the surface-manifestation of nature and reality, in general, by accepting knowing and having ideas about nature and existence, rather than the deeper awareness of our oneness with nature which is a spirit not an object. The Natives would have been our direct link to the primordial traditions which we have now lost contact with, and with ourselves.