Land is the cornerstone of Native culture

"Domestic Dependent Nations" in the Twenty-First Century: Tribal Sovereignty Re-envisioned, Reinvigorated, and Reempowered; 2005 Utah L. Rev. 443; Lexis; JLS)

<But it is said, that they are averse to society and a social life. Can anything be more inapplicable than this to a people who always live in towns or clans? Or can they be said to have no "republique," who conduct all their affairs in national councils, who pride themselves in their national character, who consider an insult or injury done to an individual by a stranger as done to the whole, and who resent it accordingly. In short, this picture is not applicable to any nation of Indians I have ever known or heard of in North America. n418 [*537] The republican principle of having a place within which to practice the art of being a good citizen is (and always has been) central to tribal society. Indian tribes have always had a concept of territory and boundaries. Most tribes assigned hunting territories to villages or lineages, which other tribes and tribal members knew of and respected. n419 Tribes also recognized (and still recognize) territory through mythical or sacred claims, and the burial sites of lineages and clans marked territory for most, if not all tribes. n420 Today, a tribe's traditional homeland is the "centerpiece of contemporary Indian life." n421 Tribal lands and their resources are not only sustaining for the tribe, but are the tribe's cultural and spiritual base - where ancestors are buried, and spirits live - and the very topography can provide cleansing and rebirth. n422 You cannot understand how the Indian thinks of himself in relation to the world around him unless you understand his conception of what is appropriate; particularly what is morally appropriate within the context of that relationship. The native American ethic with respect to the physical world is a matter of reciprocal appropriation: appropriations in which man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. n423>