The Word for World is Forest

Venturing out in new waters, this time science fiction. Or, I should say, old waters, as science fiction was all I read when I was twenty. Though I somehow missed LeGuin. Winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for science fiction, this book is a tragedy. The author enters the minds of both the new colonists and the original settlers of New Tahiti. The new colonists make assumptions about the original settlers who they call creechies and de-humanize them in their minds. The original settlers cannot comprehend the actions of the new colonists, their violence, their destruction of the forest. Only one colonist and one settler become friends and work together to understand the other group, but their peoples do not accept this understanding and the worlds collide.