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Even with the intellectual problems with this notion, scholars Calvin Martin and Callicott see some elements reflecting a type of unified perception:

What we are dealing with is two issues: the ideology of Indian land-use and the practical results of that ideology. Actually, there was a great diversity of ideologies, reflecting distinct cultural and ecological contexts. It is thus more than a little artificial to identify a single, monolithic ideology, as though all Native Americans were traditionally inspired by a universal ethos. Still, there were certain elements which many if not all these ideologies seemed to share, the most outstanding being a genuine respect for the welfare of other life-forms

However, recognition of the diversity and variety of American Indian cultures should not obscure a complementary unity to be found among them. Despite great differences, there were common characteristics that culturally united the American Indian peoples. (Callicott, 119)

Drawing on the work of Black Elk, legendary Lakota holy man, Callicott argues for such an environmental ethic.

It is hard to imagine a simpler foundation for an environmental ethic than this. To provide an analysis where none is needed, one may say that the Lakota worldview pictures nature as a large extended family, and therefore mutual duties and obligations analogous to those governing family relations should also govern human relations with the earth and sky and with all the other forms of life.

Relations between species should, in sum, be relations of mutual care and mutual dependency. Hunting-gathering Plains Indians felt no practical contradiction between their need to appropriate animals and plants for their survival and their belief that animals and plants were their siblings. Mutual care and mutual dependency imply mutual sacrifice. Provided that plants and animals were taken in response to genuine need and with demonstrative respect for the feelings of the victims, and that care was taken not to waste the harvest, then the Plains Indians, at least in their view, did nothing that contradicted their family-model environmental ethic. Wooden Leg, a nineteenth-century Cheyenne (the Cheyenne were neighbors of the Lakota and shared their basic outlook), puts this point nicely and embellishes it with a small detail:

The old Indian teaching was that it was wrong to tear loose from its place on the earth anything that may be growing there. It may be cut off, but it should not be uprooted. The trees and the grass have spirits. Whenever one of such growths may be destroyed by some good Indian, his act is done in sadness and with a prayer for forgiveness because of his necessities, the same as we were taught to do in killing animals for food and skin. (Callicott, 121-2)

Then Callicott roots this environmental ethic in the earth-mother and the sky-father, and quotes the well-known claim of Wanapum about ploughing his mother’s breast. In this way he sees the attitude to the land as based on the deeper metaphysical concepts of origin, rather than in an ethical concern for the earth itself. This connection between the time of origin and present-day conduct and attitudes should not surprise us, knowing the interconnectedness of Nature’s Laws:

Sky and earth are father and mother; therefore a filial piety should be exhibited in one's relations with one's cosmic parents. This mother-earth ethical precept was articulated by the Wanapum spiritual leader Smohalla, who was under pressure to cede territory and adopt a Euro-American lifestyle:

You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?" (Callicott, 120)

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