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One Spirit, Many Peoples
Stephen Harrod Buhner
A short, impassioned manifesto arguing that the earth itself is sacred, and that recovering that sense is essential to saving it. Stephen Harrod Buhner frames a cultural conflict he sees running through modern spiritual life: between what he calls the "Colonizing" or "Machine" mind and the "Indigenous" mind, an earth-centered way of perceiving the living world as kin. He writes candidly about the fraught question of non-Native people seeking out Native American ceremony, and about which traditions can be shared and which should not. Published in 1997, *One Spirit, Many Peoples* speaks to readers drawn to ecological spirituality and nature mysticism, though it wades directly into contested debates over cultural appropriation that it treats earnestly rather than resolves.
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The author
Stephen Harrod Buhner (1952–2022) was an American herbalist, poet, and prolific nature writer, the author of many books on plants, ecology, and what he called "the intelligence of nature." He wrote as an advocate for earth-centered spirituality rather than as an academic; readers should note that his broader herbal and healing work sits partly outside conventional medicine, and is best weighed on those terms.
The book
One Spirit, Many Peoples is a manifesto more than a study. Buhner contrasts an extractive, mechanistic worldview with an "indigenous mind" that experiences the natural world as alive and sacred, and calls for that shift in perception as an ecological and moral necessity. He engages directly with the tension between honoring Native traditions and appropriating them.
How it reads
The book's ecological urgency reads as prescient. Its handling of Native spirituality is more contested: some readers value Buhner's self-awareness about appropriation, while others are wary of any non-Native writer generalizing about "the indigenous mind." It is best approached as one passionate voice in a live and unsettled conversation, not as an authority on Native belief.
For more context
Pair with Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass for an Indigenous scientist's perspective, and with critiques of New Age appropriation of Native ceremony.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Stephen Harrod Buhner
- Publisher
- Roberts Rinehart Publishers
- Place of publication
- Niwot, CO
- Year
- 1997
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado