As a child, we could listen to the grandfathers and uncles talk about the good old days and their friends on the farms they left behind. Those conversations have been lost but remain a part of my heritage, my shaping — I have renounced those things, but return with a sense of ambivalence, that something more is lost — that there is no direction or depth in the changes.
The prairie was endless for the Amerindian, who lived securely within its radiance of circles, rippling harmonies, its ecologies — man, four-legged brothers, and spirits. Then the white man broke this, with straight lines: plows and axes. Like a bottle, the endless prairie was broken; its essence oozed away, like a bleeding wound. In breaking the tall grassed prairie, the white man created a new one — a desert of desolate spaces he could not understand, replenish, or be replenished by. He was depleting that which he came to find, forever. The history we consider is blazed by changes — turmoil, revolts, new kingdoms overriding the old; the Israeli history of ancient tentacles — it is not a history of land and people eternal, but rather a history of decay, of individual men or, at best, their generations as the whole thing changes in directions no one can foresee — the concept of PROGRESS with its central OGRE . . . the hidden desires to somehow make static or permanent the very creations of the destruction, which must obviously fail. In this new prairie the automobile was created and perfected — a means for fleeing, for destroying the COMMON UNITY of persons living through necessity in some kind of harmonic chord with the land (even the pioneers who broke the prairie and its Indian harmonies, had at least the peasants’ sense of the value of earth to man — they knew the traces of tribe in themselves and could still revere Mother Earth) — but with AUTO the prairie could be leveled even more — consider the vertical element that had been eliminated when BUFFALO were exterminated! enclaves of community become vulnerable, to escape as well as invasion — The Endless Prairie we have now can be broken. Pilgrimage made. The mind freed. We have our options, to fly away, or to enter inner circles. Either way, to become Indians (of America or Asia — both have ways). To focus, not upon the flatness, but on the hidden paths appearing in the Small Things.
As I used to chant: Hari Om Prasad!
Jnana's Red Barn 
Great rant, one I find myself playing out in my own head often, though certainly I have no claim to Native American heritage. Your last line made me think of the gross way in which Westerners perceive the world– they don’t see minutiae so well, they can’t focus on the natural world for very long. It’s an interesting and often unexplored deficiency that results from our lifestyle.
Reblogged this on evolution and commented:
As I flew over my native Iowa recently, I looked down at brownish patchwork of perfect squares, a land divided by straight lines and 90 degree angles. When European pioneers first came to Iowa, there were 14-16 inches of rich topsoil. Only 6-8 inches remained by 2000, and if nothing is done to stop this erosion, it’s estimated that Iowa’s topsoil will be gone in the next 100 years. Prior to 1850, Iowa was 85 percent prairie land. Today, less then 1/10 of 1 percent still exists.
Today, I read this hopeful post from Jnana.
So much I could say, so little that matters in the end….a lovely piece I must say.