Guardians of the land: there is a special relationship between those who live on the land that people raised in modern, urban society have lost. (Indigenous Peoples--Comment).

To Indigenous people all over the world, the land is everything. It is the creator and sustainer of life; to some it is an object of worship.

Among Indigenous societies there are almost none that have a concept of ownership of land; they don't see it as a commodity that can be bought and sold. A person lives on the land for a brief time and is gone, but the land endures. So people must be careful to preserve it--to live by the old Native saying that, "The real owners of the land have not been born yet."

Among Native people, the land and all that grows upon it is treated with the greatest respect. It, and everything in it, is sacred, and it's up to the people who use it to protect it as well.

Here's what the Nisga'a people of northwestern British Columbia say about the Nass River Valley in which they live: "We eat the roots of one type of plant, and leaves of another. We make medicine from the roots of trees. We eat what comes from hemlock, spruce, and jack pine and balsam, for medicine. All the trees and different leaves in the Nass we use--this is what the white man has taken out. They think the trees are for nothing. The trees are here for a purpose. They are just like us. We're all born for a purpose, for a job in this world. Some of us do lots, some of us a little. But we're all used for one thing or another."

To damage, or worse, to destroy any of the lands or things that live on it is the grossest insult imaginable. That's because in almost all Indigenous cultures humans are part of the land--not apart from it. There is a connectedness to the land felt by traditional peoples that no urban-dwelling person can even begin to understand.

Mountains, rivers, lakes, and plains are not inanimate; they are alive. There are spirits among trees, rocks, water, and animals that must be respected. If they are harmed they might very well destroy you.

And, as you'll read in the following pages, we have done much harm to land around the globe; the land the history books tell us European explorers "discovered." The destruction of the Amazonian jungle in Brazil where the Yanomami Indians lived in isolation for generations is only one example. Their lives were changed irrevocably in the early 1970s. There, settlers and miners have stripped the land of its nutrients--setting fire to vast tracts of forest to clear for cattle grazing pasture--and robbed it of its riches of gold, uranium, and diamonds. The burned land becomes useless in a decade, and mining operations scar the landscape. The result is devastation. In the process of clearing the land, and carting off its riches, thousands of Yanomami have been killed; they were in the way of the newcomers.

According to Brazilian scientists and the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, an estimated 44,000 [km.sup.2] were deforested during 1998 alone. They report that the Brazilian Amazon that has been destroyed has resulted only in short term profits which benefit only the 1% of the Brazilians (and their corporate supporters) who control 50% of the land.