And most Native American communities thought they were intrisically more valuable than other communities, whom they warred against, and other animals, whom they ate...after they thanked them politely, of course! A lot of the new age mumbo-jumbo that gets passed off as native American philosophy is so much wishful thinking. And, of course, it's good PR, so Indian groups will tell you it themselves!

Interestingly, the idea of the noble savage--the unspoiled, pure, closer-to-nature morality of the Indian--goes back to Europeans who never met Indians. They needed a cultural "other" to fill a space in their philosophical, religious and political ideologies. At the same time, the idea of the demonic Indian, the murderous Indian, the only good Indian being the dead Indian, was created by another set of white people to fill THEIR philosophical, religious and political needs. REAL native Americans have not been so easy to define.

Any time you take a "group" that has to include Maya, Clackamas, Navajo, Cherokee, MiqMaq, Apache, etc., and you start saying "they believe this and that," you're in trouble. Then when you buy into a seventeenth-century commonplace such as "To them, the earth and all of the things found in it (including weather phenomena) are their own flesh and blood," you're in double trouble. And when you don't stop to consider how vacuous even that commonplace is (since it is true of Western scientific belief systems too, in which on one level we and the earth are made of the detritus left over from the formation of stars, and on another we are literally genetically related to all other life on earth), you're in triple trouble.

My original point: we live in the world as it is now, and no one else is expected to give their country back to the people that had it before. No one except Israel. Meanwhile, it's well and good for CarolC to say that she wouldn't mind the US going back to Indians because it has exactly no chance of happening, so it's a real safe thing to say.