In Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), Luther Standing Bear recalls the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the time before his Lakota people were driven from their homeland in what is now South Dakota and Nebraska:

Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. (P. 38)

As Standing Bear suggests, there is no "nature." There is only the inhabited planet—the land—which must be overlaid with specific cultural meanings to become natural or wild. In the United States in the nineteenth century, nature meant different things to different people, depending...