Here’s a word that is worth bringing back into the language: heft. Its modern form indicates a weight, or heaviness, weighed by hand. No scale required. You lift a thing to get […]
What Crows Know About People in Cascadia
When Coyote trades his eyes for pebbles like Crow’s below, he can’t see a thing. It’s very funny. Each pebble is the world. Hard to choose! Each one really is the world. […]
How To Tell If You’re Living in the Sky
When you’re looking at the sky you’re in, no problem. You can’t see it. Then the problems start. How do you tell this sky … … from this one? Is it that […]
Four Seasons at Once in the Valley
While the Okanogan and the Okanagan celebrate spring … … for some, really, the petals are withering away and it is early summer. For others it is fall. For yet others, it’s […]
Smoke Bush, The Dragon Slayer
There’s an old Albanian story about a dragon that rose from the Blue-Eyed Spring and devoured the land, until it was burned out, in a track that flames with this amazing sumac, smokebush, even […]
The Purpose of Education and Indigenous Identity
Welcome to the Wallula Gap. That’s the impounded Columbia River, in its old bed there. The gap between the cliffs is so narrow that the 300 foot deep flood wave from the melting ice age that […]
Artificial Intelligence and Salmon in the Pacific Northwest
This is Cle Elum Lake. It was once the nursery for juvenile salmon that hatched in the mountains you can see in the farthest distance in this photograph. The Colvilles and the […]
The Resistance Begins
There are no words for this.The sun uses wind …. … and water … … to move sand. You could say it was gravity, or resistance, or wave forms … … but really, […]
Okanagan Rock Gardens Aren’t Just About Rocks
I thought you might like to see. Desert Parsley, Yarrow, Blue Bunch Wheatgrass, and Ponderosa Pine Cones
Aesthetic Mindfulness
Sympathetic magic is a complex term for a simple phenomena: in pre-Enlightenment culture, the power of objects was believed to derive from similarities between them; knowledge of these similarities, and the ordering […]
Okanagan Okanogan 