"You cannot separate the land from the people from the spirit. They are one thing. When you cut one, all three bleed. The white man calls this mysticism. I call it systems thinking."
Muskogee-Creek elder, medicine man, and American Indian Movement activist who carried the traditional teaching that all life is a web of relations — each node meaningful only in its coordination with every other. He spoke at the United Nations to articulate that indigenous sovereignty was inseparable from a relational cosmology that Western law could not contain.