"By now it has dawned on some purveyors of deep ecology, sustainability, biodiversity, biophilia, and the New Paradigm that these concepts were operating principles in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans decimated the cultures and peoples that practiced them." (William Kowinski's review of Linda Hogan's Power in Orion, winter 1999).

The term "reinhabitory", coined in the mid-70's by Peter Berg (www.planetdrum.org) appears to be self-explanatory to everyone who hears it in these times. Becoming indigenous to our home watersheds may not seem as critical to a European living in the Dordognes, say, or on a tributary of the Rhine, as it is to those of us living in North America, where those relationships have been highly disturbed by the invasion of profit-driven Europeans.

Many of our ancestors came here from other places in Asia, African, and Europe where we were indigenous, experts in the weather/seasons, and fellow denizens and folkways of our home watersheds. And--even though our Native American friends and neighbors are recovering their own stories, languages, and cultures now that the main disturbances (disease, alcohol, land theft, massacres) are receding--it behooves us to learn the ways of their homelands from them, as much of their knowledge is still intact.

This assumes that we will be invited to share the bounty of the native knowledge, if we prove ourselves to have pure hearts. Our native neighbors in the Bay Area--the Ohlone, Miwok, and others--and those on the Susquehanna River--the Lenape--are most generous with us.

In a time when it benefits all of us to create broad alliances, we must stand shoulder to shoulder to ward off the threats to the possibility of living an indigenous life, threats that cannot be underestimated: the effect of world capitalism or globalization continues to consume indigenous cultures around the world even as we alter our lives to reinhabit our homeplaces, many of which have come close to total destruction at the end of the Petroleum Age.

Paul Hawken may have been the first to note, in his Blessed Unrest, that a large scale movement--as yet unnamed--is afoot everywhere on this continent. (I can't speak nor does Hawken for other continents.) Local groups and issue-specific organizations, as unnumbered as the stars, are taking back local control and doing the necessary restoration. A pervasive attitude that "we will prevail" has come to replace the downward spiral that chronicled the daily assault on our human sensibilities just a couple years ago. The despair that was gathering is dissipating, as restoration accomplishes its amazing work.