This is an indispensable book for all people in the Pacific Northwest. Whether we are gatherers, farmers, Indigenous or settler, poets, novelists or government planners, this is a book that shows us how to live on the land and what kind of cultural work we must do to speak with it. The alternative is to speak against it by refusing its offerings.

I just received this book from England, no less, because it is out of print at the Royal BC Museum. Local copies cost over $100, whereas shipments from England come in at 20% of that. Get yours while you can, while BC culture turns away from the land it owns. While you’re at it, here’s a great list of other books that will help you write your land-based poems:

http://arcadianabe.blogspot.com/p/ethnobotany-and-ethnoecology-books.html

I am using Turner’s book to write a series of pamphlets to be used by teachers in developing curriculum in the Similkameen. The goal is nothing less than bringing people and the land together, in order to lay the foundation for the setting aside of contemporary English in favour of Nsyilxcen, the language that holds the DNA of the land over 10,000 years (or more) of time. One step at a time. First knowledge. Then more knowledge, that you make yourself. That’s the way.