Some excerpts from Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday:

“We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

…

I stand where Dragonfly stood and prayed; Daw-kee, give light and life to your people. Give us one more day, and one more, and at last one more. I lift my old arms in bold entreaty. There the house and arbor are falling into ruin. Those who have inherited the homestead have not cared for it. Inside the arbor, once a place of happy activity and joyful talk and laughter, I place my bare feet on the red earthen floor and breathe the summer-scented breezes that enter there, I bless this place which is sacred to me, and I ponder the omen of the dead white owl that I found in the gutted house. Even in death the snowy creature is a keeper of the earth.

…

When the great herds of buffalo drifted like a vast tide of rainwater over the green plains, it was a wonderful thing to see. But there came a day when the land was strewn with the flayed and rotting remains of those innumerable animals, slain for sport or for nothing but their hides. The Kiowas grieved and went hungry, and it was the human spirit that hungered most. It was a time of profound shame, and the worst thing of all was that the killers knew no shame. They moved on, careless, having left a deep wound on the earth. We were ashamed, but the earth does not want shame. It wants love.

…

When I was a boy my father took me to a place where relatives once lived. Nothing was left of the house but traces of a foundation. The place was far out on the plain, so far that mountains were in sight. My father, when he was a boy, visited the people there. At night, he said, we could hear the howls of prairie wolves. They are gone now. I would like to have seen them. Your grandfather told me that they were handsome, with long legs and beautiful yellow eyes, wild and searching. I try to see the wolves in my mind’s eye, but I can only imagine them. I wish I could describe them to you. My father’s voice had trailed off. Will I tell my grandchildren, I wonder, of animals they will never see?

…

On one side of time there are herds of buffalo and antelope. Redbud trees and chokecherries splash color on the plain. The waters are clear, and there is a glitter on the early morning grass. You breathe in the fresh fragrances of rain and wind on which are borne silence and serenity. It is good to be alive in this world. But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity.

…

Those who deny the spirit of the earth, who do not see that the earth is alive and sacred, who poison the earth and inflict wounds upon it have no shame and are without the basic virtues of humanity. And they bring ridicule upon themselves.

I am ashamed before the earth
I am ashamed before the heavens
I am ashamed before the dawn
I am ashamed before the evening light
I am ashamed before the sky
I am ashamed before the sun

This pronouncement from the Navajo has increasing relevance in our time. Daw-kee, let me not be ashamed before the earth.”