The Way It is: One Water...One Air...One Mother Earth...

By Corbin Harney

Book Overview

As I see it all around me, the trees are dying out, our water is contaminated, and our air is not good to breathe. Those are the reasons why today I'm trying my best to come back to our ways of thousands of years ago.

We have to come back to the Native way of life. The Native way is to pray for everything, to take care of everything. Our Mother Earth is very important. We can't just misuse her and think she's going to continue. We can see what's taking place: the animal life, the tree life, even the water is telling us, but we're not paying attention to it.

We've been told to take care of what we've got so that we can leave something for the younger generation. We've tried to practice that from the beginning of our life, but we forgot our way.

"I never have spoken out until lately here, the Spirit coming to me and telling me, "Well, you are going to have to give us a hand here". In a vision, not too many years ago, the water came to me and told me, "I'm going to look like water, but pretty soon nobody's going to use me". These words came from the water, the Spirit. Now I see that the water has been polluted everywhere you go, and pretty soon we're not going to be able to use it.

All living things like to enjoy clean water. The rocks right here, they want clean water. The tree life has to have clean water. We are all one life, and clean water is something we have to rely on.

We, the people, are going to have to put our thoughts together to save our planet here. We only have One Water... One Air... One Mother Earth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0931892805
• ISBN13: 9780931892806
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Pelican Pond
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

"The World is as sharp as a knife"

and the truth shall set you free. Read this book at all costs. Learn from someone who lives on the frontlines everyday, a man with so much humility and heart. Uncle Corbin left a good trail for us to learn from, now its time we make up our minds and get walking on our own straight path. RIP Uncle, we miss your walk.

A Bridge Between Indigenous People and Environmentalists

Enmeshed in the high-tech, hyperspeed, information-age economy, it's easy for most of us to forget that we simply cannot survive without clean air, clean water, clean soil. It's also easy to shrug off your concerns by thinking, "What can one person do?" Corbin Harney, a spiritual leader of the Western Shoshone tribe, demonstrates what one person with a vision can do. "The Way It Is" is a wake-up call. It lays out Harney's vision of the law of life, the law that native peoples have always understood--that we have only one planet to take care of.Since 1985, Harney and other Western Shoshone people have been fighting against nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. (The Nevada Test Site occupies land that the federal government illegally seized from the tribe in the 1940s to use for weapons testing.) The elderly Harney has totally dedicated himself to healing people, healing the land, and--most important--sharing his vision about the damage that nuclear pollution and other environmental abuses are doing to the land, air, and water. In down-to-earth, direct language, Mr. Harney lays out his beliefs and speaks directly to your heart.His vision about water is alarming: "One time...when I was praying for the water, the water said to me, 'I'm going to look like water, but pretty soon nobody's going to use me.' Now, wherever I go, the people talk about their water being contaminated, and they can't use it."Harney leads ceremonies and healing rituals on tribal land in Nevada and travels the Earth to talk to whomever will listen, telling them to pray for the Earth.Over the years, he has achieved the stature of a moral authority for the Earth. He says, "I pray in the mornings for the sun, the air, the water, plants, the animals, the rocks. Those prayers have been passed on down from way back for thousands of years, but we haven't been doing enough of these things, of taking care of things, and now we have to come back to it. We are going to have to start taking care of things again."