Consider, in contrast, the profound ecological intelligence of Black Elk, ‘a holy man of the Oglala Sioux,’ who in telling his story said that it was not his own life that was important to him, but what he had shared with all life: ‘It is the story of all life that is holy and it is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things …’ And of the great vision that came to him when he was a child he said: ‘I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and
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