ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a North American Indian man (Cherokee and Lakota), and a European woman, to illuminate the way a North American Indian's philosophical system can be seen as an example of human ecology. The Oglala Lakota concept of the medicine wheel helps us to see all the ways we can talk about Spiritual integration in reference to time and space. The social constructionist movement shows an uncanny grasp of Lakota ideology in the way it discusses the idea of mind as something socially constructed through dialogue. The spirits of the natural elements had their own order. Healing came from Lakota spirituality arising in the connection between the natural world and the divine. The term ecology was first used by Ernst Haeckel in 1868 to refer to interdependencies among organisms in the natural world. Ecology is part of systems philosophy, which suggests that all organized wholes have ontological status and are seen as greater than the sum of their parts.
