Given these principles, it follows that there is a direct connection between identity and landscape. Households, tribes and communities initially define themselves as social groups by their contacts with the landscape they live in, not in terms of a pre-set human hierarchical organization. True, most every Indigenous group has what we would call creation myths…true tales of how the world came to be and how the original ancestors came on earth. These are no different in intent than our story of Adam and Eve. What is clear is, that the story sets the framework for people within a landscape. That they are within a landscape is the crucial ingredient of the stories. Many tribal identities were simply ‘the people,’ without the distinguishing marker of a special name for the group. It was the natural landscape within which they lived that made them distinctive.

Indigenous groups accepted this: all knew whom the people were by where they lived and how they related to their land. This notion is larger than our concept of land. It is more like our notion of an environment, a network, an eco-system. What the social group or tribe holds and expresses reflects, initially at any rate, a direct response from being immersed in this "natural" system, from which all understandings of identity are drawn. Physical land is but one element of that, yet it is a truly foundational one. Moreover, the basic intuition is not individualized personhood but the "natural" person, with the "natural" being understood as being situated in a network of relationships from which it is impossible to extricate oneself or one’s group. One is embedded in this living organism first and foremost. We have no other way of talking about such a view of reality than to call it a worldview of a particular type: a kind of natural religion, but even then we must be cautious not to impose our ideas of God, gods and moral codes upon it. Rather it indicates an unmediated immediacy within both physical and metaphysical realities.