The Legends Live On: "If we can learn to understand the ways of the native people, these sacred lands will bring us back to our own humanness and remind us of our connection with all living beings on this earth.".

• Author: Saraiya, Sej
• Position: Focus

WITHIN THE VAST unbounded terrain of New Mexico, the canyons and arches of Arizona and Utah that are ephemerally painted by the sun, the scorching salt flats of Death Valley, and the interminable white sand dunes of El Paso, there exists a silence, a sort of purl spiraling inward to the portal within. For centuries, these lands were inhabited by Native Americans, who lived in complete harmony with nature. Their deep knowledge of the migration patterns of animals, the seasonally changing topography of the land, and the medicinal properties of endemic plants enabled them to survive off of the land and develop a deep relationship with it.

Among the Native Americans, humans and animals always have belonged to the same family. For a vast majority of people, it may be hard to fathom why the natives fight for the things they fight for: preventing construction on a piece of land, for instance, that is so rich with resources that it seems obvious to exploit it; or building an observatory on a mountain which is an ideal location to study the sky; or restricting hunting, fishing, drilling, and mining for our planet's natural resources. Yet, when we take a look at the centuries of traditions and rituals they have practiced to take care of the lands, it becomes easier to understand.

According to the creation myth of the Hawaiians, the one who created the island and the mountains also created the people; hence, we are all siblings from the same mother. The cosmogonic poem of the Hawaiians, the Kumulipo chant, relates the origin of the cosmos to the origin of the human race.

Among indigenous people, even the size of a hunt is negotiated and balanced, never taking more than is needed. The hunted game is utilized wholly, the deceased animal's skin used as clothing, the bones as tools. The Shasta people--who believed that the first fish to ascend the stream annually brought the "salmon medicine" from the first Salmon Ceremony of the Yurok tribe at the mouth of the Klamath River --allowed the first salmon to swim upstream unharmed. Only then did the fishing begin.

It is hard to drill through a mountain when it is considered to be a sentient being or a dwelling place of ancestral spirits. The native people of the La Sal Mountains in Utah, which is believed to be the dwelling place of the spirits, consider it very important to have unobstructed views of the mountains while performing rituals at the arches.

At Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, the Paiute legend goes that the rocks were once a certain type of people, who were all turned to stone by Coyote for behaving badly. The rock formations, called hoodoos, still depict the faces of those people with paint on them just like before being turned into rocks.

The people of this land have lived in reciprocity with the land, using the ponderosa bark to...