American Indian Culture and Research Journal

One cannot read important voices of nature writing and ecology literature without noticing a view of landscape that closely parallels an indigenous perspective. For example, Barry Lopez gains insight from the Navajo culture to ground his thoughts concerning how story and landscape function to bring interior harmony to an individual otherwise bound in chaos. The Navajo ceremony Beauty Way is “a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe” for the purpose of “re-creating” individuals in order “to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape.” Other writers in the genre, such as Aldo Leopold, emphasize a view of land similar to that of a Native understanding. In his famous “Land Ethic” he warns against seeing land as a commodity, instead emphasizing the communal aspects of land. John Graves, in Goodbye to a River, echoes the notion of spirituality, landscape, and individual identity and consciousness. In his elegiac journey Graves’s Thoreau-like observations also include reverential references to the “People” who inhabited his Brazos River before the whites arrived. Another important book for literary ecologists, Harry Middleton’s The Earth Is Enough, posits Elias Wonder, a dislocated Sioux, along with the two protagonists who resist modernization, relying instead on the insights gained by observing indigenous culture. Jack Burns, the protagonist of Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, celebrates the “rocks and trees and spirits of the wilderness” as he is acutely aware of “another presence.”