96 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
our personal experience with these cultures have helped to shape our
thinking about nature-based expressive arts practice that honors
the Earth.
Thomas Berry (1988) says that native peoples have some of the
most integral traditions of the intimate relationship of humans with
the Earth and its many beings. Such traditions, he says, are heightened
rather than diminished by the disintegrating times through which
they have passed in the aftermath of colonialism. Berry suggests that
even a small amount of contact with native peoples can help us to
once again become capable of experiencing the immediacy of life.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), professor of environmental biology
and member of the Potawatomi Nation, says that to be indigenous
means to live as if our material and spiritual lives and those of our
children depend on how we live in relationship to the land we inhabit.Indigenous peoples
The word indigenous derives from Latin indigena , born in a country,
native and, originally, to spring from the land. Indigenous refers to
any species existing in a place or country rather than arriving from
another place. Many indigenous people also refer to themselves as
Native People or First Nations People. According to Cultural Survival
(www.culturalsurvival.org), a non-profit group that advocates for the
rights of indigenous peoples, approximately 370 million people in the
world are considered indigenous, belonging to at least 5000 different
groups with some 4000 distinct languages and cultural traditions
that are still practiced today. This huge diversity is important to note
in order to emphasize the fact that any generalizations made about
indigenous people are necessarily reductions.
In the Americas the indigenous peoples are considered to
be the pre-Columbian peoples, those living in the Americas before
the arrival of Europeans. In the United States, Native Americans are
those people whose pre-Columbian ancestors were living in the land.
It is important to remember that these indigenous peoples of the
Americas, as is true worldwide, are composed of numerous distinct