Sublime

1970s, academic turned farmer Wendell Berry wrote about how economic success includes the hidden cost of depriving people “of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water.”⁠14 What was once the riches of self‑reliance have become things with a price.

Natural capital is one of four broad categories of the commonwealth that also comprises social, cultural, and spiritual capital. Each consists of things that were once free, part of self-sufficiency or the gift economy, that we now pay for. The robbery then is not from mother earth, but from mother culture.

Wells was chosen to represent the Miami Nation in a negotiation with the United States, but on arrival for talks he encountered a brother from the family he had been separated from for a decade. He was persuaded to return to Kentucky and served as a ranger for the US Army.

That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource but as a relationship between people and place, a profound feature of the resilience of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

It wasn’t long, however, before Champlain recognized that in order to get premium northern furs (and at a better price), he had to deal directly with the Odawa and Ojibwe.

There was also something innately American—befitting the libertarian ethos that individualism was the root of success—in the new oil and gas wealth that sprang from the ground.