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Painting by Emil Bisttram, 1940, titled "Mother Earth" (Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago)	In many Amerindian mythological traditions the Earth is represented as a woman and is usually addressed with the term “mother” or “grandmother”. For example, a mythological tale of the  Okanagon, in the Plateau of the Rocky Mountains, narrates as the Creator, called the Chief, created the earth from a woman. He stretched her body across the world and transformed the body of the woman in the earth we live on. He made the first humans from balls of red earth or mud. Generally, the Creator left the task to complete the work of creation and transformation to Coyote, deciding to depart. He advised the humans that, when the Earth should become very old, he should come back, bringing with him the spirits of the dead (Boas 1917). Among the Lakota, Maka is the female figure who incarnates the Spirit of the Earth, is responsible for the alternation of the seasons and for the growth of plants and grasses. According to some versions, the earth disk, Maka, originated from the sacrifice of a primordial being, Inyan, the Rock. The buffalo came out from the Earth, having their habitation in the underworld, in the deep of the earth. In the words of an old Lakota man, at the beginnings of the twentieth century: “The spirit of the buffalo stays with the skull until the horns drop off. If the horns are put on the skull, the spirits returns to it. The earth eats the horns and when they are eaten the spirit goes to the buffalo tipi in the earth. The way to the buffalo tipi is far in the west” (Walker 1980: p. 124). For the Lakota, humans and buffalo had the same origin in the underground world and formed a unique substantial reality. So much so that the origin tales call humankind, when they still lived in the lower world, Buffalo People (M. Powers 1986: p. 37).

In a well-known volume, the religion scholar Sam Gill has maintained that the concept of Mother Earth developed among the Native American peoples only in a recent period, as a result of the influence of a set of Euro-American imaginary products. Such an element should have fostered the development of forms of representations of the Native identity, searching for recognition and visibility (Gill 1987).  Despite this opinion, however, the majority of scholars are in agreement in regarding the female and motherhood symbolism of the Earth as a widespread element in the pre-colonial cultures of the Americas. Though it is admissible that this concept had been subjected to a long series of reformulations and reinterpretations, since the Colonial period.