Things aren't right when people think of the land as a pie that can be sliced up in pieces. One quarter will live well, and another quarter will be reasonable. But the other half won't do too well at all. No matter how you cut a pie, in the end there's nothing holding it together. It gets eaten up like raisins.

It's better for people to live as if they're inside a ball. The sky, upstairs and downstairs, the four directions: these will hold everything together and not let anything escape because a ball has a top to cover us and a bottom to hold us, and everything works together.

-Ron Geyshick, an Ojibway healer from Ontario