Sublime

Ecology came out around the same time, suggesting that the “patriarchal foreground” of the visible world can be overcome by contemporary women “moving beyond the boundaries of patriarchal space” into the “matriarchal background” of our re-membered ancient past.

It may be that all the workers of magic and sorcery were differently gendered, at least when seen in the light of their much better documented cousins in the circumpolar cultures of the last three hundred years. In much of Siberia, for example, it has been argued many times that ‘shaman’ (or its equivalent) constitutes a gender in itself.

Nature? From all the observable records left to us by these ancient ancestors, it appears that they had enough food, comfortable and attractive shelters, deeply artistic abilities and the leisure to pursue them, a scientific understanding of the movements of the planets and stars that surpasses our own, and a spiritual sense of being part of someth

Putting Native Americans back in the picture meant radically redefining what nature means and what the human place in it might be (another undoing of a dichotomy, the nature–culture divide, with profound implications for the environmental movement, which has not yet altogether come to terms with this revision of meaning).