The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America

"Some day the earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice, if you help her or let her die, and when she dies, you too will die."
~
John Hollow Horn, Oglala Lakota, quoted in 1932

---

I have just started reading a book that I first read when my son was a toddler in the early 2000s. It had a profound affect on me then and the first words I read (quoted above) had a similar impact on Saturday. These prophetic words left me feeling quite melancholic about the future of our planet.
While this is fundamentally a book about how a proud and intelligent indigenous peoples who were subject to what can only be described as a programme of genocide, it is also about the native peoples' relationship with with the land on and off which they lived, and the plants, creatures, air and water they relied on to survive. They had apparently been doing so in relative harmony for many thousands of years before the Europeans arrived.
As time goes on, the question of who was right about the risks of rapid ecomomic growth becomes a little easier to answer.
I am looking forward to recalibrating my views about sustainability as I progress through it.

The Earth Shall Weep: History of Native America