Here's a passage from [[Blackfoot Physics]]. It is a thought experiment which allows us to understand the depth of relationship that Indigenous peoples might feel in connection to their ancestral landscapes. > For Native people the land is their body and their flesh, and its landscape can be found with the map in the head. To deny a people's origins is to cut them off not simply from the land they physically occupy but also internally—from the very sense of their own bodies. > > I believe that this deep connection to landscape and origin is present within all of us. Let the reader try this simple experiment. Close your eyes and remember the bedroom you had as a small child. In your mind move around the room, go to the door and walk about the house. Now go out of the house and look around you. Think of the school you went to, or a nearby friend or relative. Leave your house and take a journey to that other location, remembering when to turn left or right, when to cross a street. As you go you will remember familiar sights, a corner store, a park, a neighbor's dog. > > Practice doing this for a few hours and you will be amazed to find that the landscape of your childhood is still alive in your body and mind. As you walk in your imagination you can almost feel and taste and smell the world around you; and note how you have been looking at it from a child's height and perspective and not that of an adult. > > In my case, when I do this I am saddened to realize that so much must have changed. But suppose that this land that lives in you has not changed, suppose that it is the same land occupied by your parents and grandparents and back, back for many generations. Suppose also that you have been given responsibility for the land that lives within your body and mind. Would not your actions be tempered by this knowledge? Would you not wish to renew and preserve it over the years? And further suppose that your actions and beliefs are shared and reinforced by all around you. This, I think must be what it is like for Indigenous people. Their sense of connection must be more intense, but it is, I believe, one shared by all human beings.