Warblers in the treetops, kingfishers along the shore, and an osprey moving fast up high.

Other wildlife as well:

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From the book Original Instructions: Indigenous Teaching for a Sustainable Future

Remembering the Original Instructions I wept repeatedly at the beauty and wisdom painted by the voices and visions of the First Peoples and their allies in these numinous pages. They reveal a “house made of stories,” in N. Scott Momaday’s phrase. They embody some of the most ancient wisdom on earth from the world’s “old-growth cultures.” It’s precisely what humanity most needs now to slip through this epochal keyhole of history where the stakes are the very survival of our species and countless other beings in the web of life. It’s a journey to retrieve the Original Instructions for how to live on earth in a good way, in a way that lasts. It’s a journey to recover the sacred.

As we enter the turbulent onset of global environmental collapse, these teachings remind us that what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. Of equal importance, what we do to each other, we do to the earth. We’ll have peace with the earth only when we have peace with each other, as Chief Oren Lyons says. And we’ll have peace with each other only when we have justice.

Part of the Original Instructions resides in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). For millennia, Indigenous Peoples have acted as guardians of the biological diversity of the planet. They’ve successfully managed complex reciprocal relationships between diverse biological and human cultures, with their eyes on the time horizon of seven generations to come. This is high-TEK that has already solved many of the environmental challenges threatening humanity today. It shows how human beings can actually play a richly positive role in the web of life as a keystone species that creates conditions conducive to life for all beings. As Native American restoration ecologist Dennis Martinez observes, humanity has never faced global ecological collapse before. To get through this keyhole, we’re going to need the enduring knowledge of Indigenous science, as well as the best of leading edge Western science. It’s high-tech meets high-TEK, and in many cases modern science is affirming what the keen empiricism of First Peoples has long known.

This is the sacred geography of a world where all life is revered and animated by spirit. There is no separation between the technical and spiritual. It’s a world of kinship where all life is related. Its instructions seem so simple: to be grateful—to practice reverence for community and creation—and to enjoy life.

The Original Instructions remind us that it’s not people who are smart. The real intelligence dwells throughout the natural world and in the vast mystery of the universe that’s beyond our human comprehension. Humility is our constant companion. The Original Instructions celebrate our interdependence and interconnection with the diversity of life and one other. They help us remember who we are, that we were all Indigenous to a place not so many generations ago. They invite us to re-indigenize ourselves to our common home, Mother Earth. That is the keyhole we must slip through. It’s very small, and we’ll have to make ourselves very small to pass through it.