When you are born to a world, in which the old growth forests are bunchgrasses less than a metre high… … and live in these forests for close to half the time […]
The Wind in the Grass
Dancing the New Year Home
In thickness, there is a way through. Plum thicket. In the darkness, there is light. Plum thicket. Even the darkness is light. Plum thicket. Even the light is darkness. Russian olive. Even […]
40. The Pacific Northwest and Its Borders
Names are slippery. A popular one these days is “The Pacific Northwest.” Portland: A Settlement in the Pacific Northwest, with the ancestor Wy’east in the Background Don’t believe everything you read about […]
Mallard Ducks Flowing Downstream
What a spirited pair! Vernon Creek I think I will never see a duck in the same way again. Here’s the happy pair a second later, old style. Quack! Quack! Quack!
39. The Beginnings and Ends of History
Euroamerican histories do not tell the story of the Pacific Northwest. Not really. A story of colonial cultures set in native space. This is the story of the Canadian province called British […]
Cedars Dancing in the Snow
Forget any thoughts of darkness. These are days of such light. The light was fading in the cedar forest on Rose Swanson Mountain in Splatsin Territory this afternoon. There was too little […]
The Red Beech of the Middle Rhine
Tonight, we celebrate birth and renewal at the intersection of Earth and Sky. Trees are a great place for that, both the wooden kind and the human ones walking through the woods […]
37. A Land of Gifts
A vital part of the history of the Pacific Northwest is the concept of how your body relates to it culturally as a body among other bodies. This is not the same […]
36. Alliances and the Mountains: War by Other Means, Part 3.
To understand why the Hudson Bay Company might have wanted to destroy the stock of beavers in the Snake River country, it’s helpful to go back to 1809, when John Jacob Astor, […]
34. War by Other Means, Part 1
In my last post https://okanaganokanogan.com/2022/11/22/39-you-say-skaha-i-say-sqexeʔ/, number 33 in this series, I pointe out that even the simple concepts that determine human relationships to land today, things universally dispersed or at least fought […]
Okanagan Okanogan 