This land is our land, it's not George Bush's land

Another of Vine Deloria’s central tenets in God is Red is that spirituality cannot be divorced from place. When a people have spent long enough in one place, dependent on – perhaps I should say interdependent with – an ecosystem for water, shelter, and sustenance, the specific places in that land, and all the animate and inanimate features of that land come to be vested with sacredness. This is my experience of North America. North America is the land that nurtured me and sustained me for 40 years. I love its forests and mountains and rivers, its fields and deserts and coasts. Here in Australia, I miss the natural world in North America the way I might miss a good friend or a romantic partner or a family member. And while I can keep in touch with my human connections by phone and email (though it’s better to visit in person), I can’t connect with a pine forest in the Rocky Mountains that way. Forests aren’t good at sending emails! Although Australia is very beautiful and exotic, I simply don’t feel that kind of connection here yet, not after just two years.

Ironically, one of the things I am discovering by being an immigrant here in Australia is just how much I was connected to the land in North America, regardless of which horrific administration is running things there. I don’t like the economic, domestic or foreign policies of the Bush administration. I think those idiots are ruining the U.S.A, the nation. So I left for a country that I hoped had better policies, wanting to have a chance to live in a real democracy. I am wondering if my deepest loyalty isn’t to the nation of the U.S.A. but to the land of North America. I am quite certain that Native Americans have been more unhappy than I am with many presidential administrations over the years, and just as certain that the U.S. government was ruining this country. But do Indians leave and go live somewhere else, hoping that the government there will be better? No, they don’t abandon the land that is sacred to them. They fight, and feel angry and frustrated, but they maintain their connection to the land that matters to them, and they wait. Because all empires wither in time. I could do the same. I could go home. My land is now colonized by a horrific empire in the form of the current U.S. government, but that empire is showing signs of crumbling. I need to make my loyalty to the land and the ecosystems more than to the particular government. I love the land of North America.