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 […]
Dancing the New Year Home
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 […]
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 […]
33. You Say Skaha, I say Sqexeʔ
The Okanagan Valley, a European space since 1859, hasn’t shed its colonial roots. Becoming a part of Canada in 1871 didn’t do a whole lot about that, partly because when you colonize […]
Two Views of the Heart
Well, you can take an old ranch and make a state park. That’s one thing you can wear your heart on your sleeve. Columbia Hills, Washington That’s Oregon in the distance. Or […]
32. The Land Talks
Technology that works with the land is not one of force. This is not always immediately obvious in a culture built around action. This action includes the obvious, such as the active […]
31. Humans and Bears and History
As I hope my post yesterday made clear, traditional Indigenous cultures are as dynamic as European ones and European ones are as constant as traditional Indigenous ones. We can have a sentence […]
30. Weaponizing the West: Part 2
The Americans who arrived on the Columbia in the 1830s and 1840s said that their power came from their God. The power was certainly there, and the zeal. From 1790 through 1840, […]
29. Weaponizing the West: Part 1
Yesterday, I spoke about how the mobility provided by horses allowed the Cayuse to translate their lush grasslands into dominance over the Central Columbia and to exact tribute in the form of […]
28. The Spiritual Power of Horses in Old Oregon
To recap: the extensive Indigenous slave trade with the Spanish in the Southwest, and a fight for new technology (the horse), drove Indigenous cultural change on the western edges of New France […]
Okanagan Okanogan 