The love of one’s land begins when there are no words to shape its expression; no ideas to map what it can and can’t be. It is open-wide, enveloping, and unexplained: colours and sounds and feelings deeper for their darkness; vaster for their emptiness. Our relationship with land begins and ends with life itself, and whether we loftily reach for the universal in the abstract sense of “existence” or casually chalk our memories and impressions down to “experience,” no words or ideas, nor even our actions, can separate us from the fabric and flow of space and time. To be is to already belong. To live is to have landed—here, now, in the midst of everything else.

This atomic truth is known to the majority of modern humans, in theory, that is, in thought. We may even recognize this as “important,” even “urgent,” but there are those of us whose lives are so shaped by this primordial experience that they have institutionalized it in their culture, designed their days around it. To them, to have a relationship with the land is simply “normal”—there is nothing outside of it. For lack of a better word, or perhaps for lack of a greater awareness, we call them indigenous.