I have worked here since 2011 telling stories of the Earth as preparation for a history of the Intermontane Grasslands of Central Cascadia and the rainswept coast that keeps them windy and dry. Now I am presenting this history, step by step, as I have learned it, often from the land itself. The history of this region includes the Canadian colonial space “The Okanagan Valley”, which lies over the land I live in above Canim Bay. The story stretches deep into the American West, into the US Civil War, the War of 1812, and the Louisiana Purchase, as well into the history of the Columbia District of the Hudson’s Bay Company. In all, the story spans the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and the basins that surround them. In this vast watershed lie homelands as old as 13,200 years (Sequim) and 16,200 years (Salmon River.) That’s how far we are walking together here, who are all the land speaking.
Preying Mantis, Turtle Mountain Sculptural Assemblage
I took a different deer trail.
Okanagan Okanogan 
Is Turtle Mountain in the Canadian Okanagan? Sounds like a very beautiful and strong place with an ancient stone eagle – in our journeys we often have encountered these wild stone animals… messages from the ancient ones across time…
beautiful details on the mantis….
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Hi, yes, it’s in Vernon. If you search the blog for “turtle” or “eagle”, it might bring you others at the Peshastin Pinnacles, Umatilla Rock and Horse Thief Butte (search for those, too), not to mention Turtle Island by Wenatchee. Travelling in East Germany, I realized that we have guides and that they are there to be followed. Travelling in Iceland, I found the trolls. I asked my friend Daniela about all that, Beautiful Daniela, the poet and philosopher, who comes from Bulgaria by way of West Africa, and she pointed out that it’s like that for everyone on the planet, except for people in the West. It’s good to know you are following the guides, too.
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That is great food for a northern journey… recently the City of Portland returned a medicine stone that had been stolen by railroad workers, stored at city hall for years – back to Umatilla…
I think the European loss of this kind of knowledge may be a legacy of the Inquisition in which those who practiced the knowledge and ways of the earth were systematically destroyed – in my families homeland of Cornwall each village had a garrack sans – a village stone – often with alignments to leys – that was a prayer stone circled 9 times by the elders each day – during the rise of methodism most of these were broken into pieces and used in building construction by zealots.
You may be aware of the landscape zodiac that surrounds Glastonbury – visible from airplanes and stored in the ancient correspondences of place names. The Blackfeet on the East side of the Rockies have similar geographic correspondences of their mythic first warrior that goes from Calgary down to the Blackfoot in Montana…
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