Earth is Our Mother


Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.

We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.

Oglala Sioux Proverb

Alice Shepherd
by Alice Shepherd

The Soreness of the Land

treat the earth well

WARNING: Treat the Earth Well

by
Kate Luckie
Wintu medicine woman

"Everywhere The Land Is Sore"
native prophecy of Kate Luckie, Wintu shaman or *natural doctor*

Her prophecy is as follows:

When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north. Everyone will drown. That is because the white people never cared for the land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don't chop down the trees. We only use dead wood.

But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, "Don't. I am sore. Don't hurt me." But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them.

The Indians never hurt anything, but white people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth. The rock says, "Don't. You are hurting me." But the white people pay no attention. When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking.

The white people dig deep long tunnels. They make roads. They dig as much as they wish. They don't care how much the ground cries out. How can the spirit of the Earth like the white man? That is why God will upset the world -- because it is sore all over. Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. It looks sick. So it gets even by killing him when he blasts. But eventually the water will come.


Quoted from

Cora DuBois, Wintu Ethnography, pp 75-76

Note: Kate Luckie is the aunt of Grace McKibbin (1894-1987)



Her Wintu Roots | sacred Wintu lands | Fiscal Stewardship | The long view | Gaming demurral| Earth Mother Crying | Native Prophets Speak | Savage whites?




The white man's Bible warns of a time, a day of judgment, when the Great Judge, the Spirit in the Sky, shall reward the faithful, and shall destroy them which destroy the earth.


And then ... when that time has come ...

Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.
                Leviticus 26:34


EARTH MOTHER CRYING



stjo.org


Modern man, the world eater, respects no space and no thing green or furred as sacred. The march of the machines has entered his blood.

Loren Eisley



It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.

John F. Kennedy



It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility

Rachel Carson




Nature -- her power to thrill or calm, her thunderpeal, her mother-touch, her divine instructiveness.


Earth is Our Mother
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