To You We Shall Return (eBook)

“Grandmother, you who listen and hear all, you from whom all good things come...It is your embrace we feel when we return to you...' This traditional Lakota prayer to Grandmother Earth opens Joseph Marshall III's newest work, a meditation on our connection to the land and an exhortation to respect it. Using a combination of personal anecdote, detailed history, and Lakota tales, Marshall takes us back to his childhood and shows us how we, too, can learn to love our planet.
Although he was educated in Euro-American schools, Marshall had the benefit of growing up with wise grandparents who taught him never to walk a path without knowing the trail from which he'd come: that the bow does not make the hunter, and above all, that the earth can be boundlessly generous-if we can learn to accept its gifts.

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The Lakota philosopher offers a personal account of how Native Americans adapted to the environment-and what we can learn from their example.Part memoir, part cultural manifesto, To You We Shall Return offers a comparison between Euro-American and Native American approaches to the environment. Lakota philosopher Joseph M. Marshall discusses how native cultures adapted to fit within the environment, as opposed to changing it drastically to fit human needs and comforts. Through personal anecdote, detailed history, and Lakota tales, Marshall takes us back to his childhood and shows us how we, too, can learn to love our planet.Suggesting a shift in our contemporary thinking, Marshall argues that relating to the earth in a less harmful way does not require a drastic change in lifestyles. Instead, revisiting the methods of adaptation and coexistence with the earth will foster a renewed respect which will ultimately benefit mankind as well.