Descriptions of nature are virtually nonexistent in native Amazonian literature. What we call nature is, in native Amazonian stories, inseparable from history: a permanent state of transformation. Native Amazonian creation stories, for instance, never include an idea of a virgin, untouched nature: trees, animals, rocks, mountains, waterfalls, and topographic markers are the result of transformations, often caused by the interaction between characters. When the European Romantic poet looked at the natural world, he saw the possibility of an encounter with the unchanging and the sublime, and in his poetry he created metaphors and similes that could express his sense of insignificance before Nature. The native Amazonian poet looks at a mountain and invents a story to explain how it came to acquire its peculiar shape, or how it came to be there at all. It is, so to speak, a poetics of narrative: everything that exists has a story, and to exist is to have a story. Many of these stories are sacred, and are recited by the shamans and elder members of the community in rituals or special occasions, while others are simply funny, entertaining ways to explain how things or beings came into existence. Often enough, however, the distinction between sacred, funny, and everyday stories is irrelevant, as the same stories can be all these things at the same time.

Never in Amazonian stories have we a relationship between humans and what we call landscape (rivers, lakes, mountains, topographic markers) without the clear participation, collaboration, and interference of animals. Differently from the Judeo-Christian genesis, animals in native Amazonian creation stories were not made to be ruled by man: they are an active part of the process of transformation of the world. Without them, humans would not know what they know, and would not be what they are. A recent theoretical elaboration on the relationship between humans and animals in Amazonia is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's discussions on what he has named, with the help of Nietzsche and Deleuze, “perspectivism”. Based on his own ethnographic fieldwork and that of other anthropologists, particularly Tania Stolze Lima, Viveiros de Castro proposes that Amerindian Amazonian ontology is fundamentally distinct from our own. While for western science humans and animals share ‘animality’ as their general denominator (in other words, we are all animals), in Amazonian Amerindian thought the common denominator that links humans and animals is ‘peopleness’ [gentitude].