Whereas many worldviews held by indigenous people are holistic and harmonious with nature, recognizing both the intrinsic and instrumental value in everything, other worldviews are both economically and scientifically driven. As seen in the Lakota case study, the indigenous people had kinship ties with the land in which they were stewards of, but not owners. Private property was a foreign concept to them, that wasn’t introduced until the U.S. Dawes Act. The Lakota also believed that there was a natural cosmological order to things. While responsible utilization of resources were key to them, salvage conservation did not exist because of the absence of hierarchies in their view of the eco-system. Everything was equal, and everything was balanced. Contrastingly, in Western belief, un-grazed and un-aggregated land was a waste of resources, thereby justifying their consumption practices deemed by the U.S. Dawes Act. They commoditized the land, and forcefully made the Lakota accept their terms about land stewardship through the allotment system (Ross 2011). To this day, the U.S. government has ignored the complexity of the kinship relations between the Lakota and the land. While efforts have been made to include tribal members in executive decisions, it is structured around a Western form of bureaucracy, all of which demonstrates foreigners’ inabilities to understand different worldviews. 

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