I am not angry. I am sad. My elders taught me that these were cat tails. They taught me that poetry was a fairy tale. They taught me that these were swamp […]
Against the Descending Night, A Prayer in the Rushes
The Lessons of Red Osier Dogwood
I went looking for light. In a grey world, it was all in the red osier dogwoods, stəktəkcxʷlɬp, the purifier, the beloved of moose. I spent some time with it as it turned […]
Sustaining the Okanagan 21: The City of the Okanagan
In keeping with my conviction that we would do better to build things than tear them down, I would like to propose a new form of civilization in the Okanagan Valley. By […]
Art and Ethics on the Okanagan’s Ancient Water
The sun rises. It draws the night fog off of Okanagan Lake. It’s early and 18 Below Zero. The gulls sleep on. The gulls that seem to have erupted from the lake. […]
How the British Columbia Government Looks After the Land and the Water
It doesn’t. If I look from my house towards the western shore of Okanagan Lake, I see this. The land has been burnt, slashed by logging roads, scarred by development and turned into an […]
Do the Rich Have All the Fun?
You tell me. That’s their houses up above, and some beautiful ice drifting in. Below, is Okanagan Lake the next day after the wind did its thing all night long. I have […]
The Real Work is to Take Down the Fences
The task is to provide young people with support for their energy and visions, and space for them to open them into physical and social expression. All young people have a need […]
Water for the Kids
I attended a discussion of water tonight in the colonial city of Kelowna. I realize now that “water” is the wrong thing to discuss. “Water” is a use for a form of […]
The Private Landscapes of the Okanagan Valley
Here’s a healthy stand of bunchgrass, which I showed you a couple days ago. As I mentioned, the Okanagan Valley of the North Eastern Pacific Rim probably looked like this 200 years […]
The People of the Grass
Just look at this Great Basin Giant Wild Rye in the late November sun. It’s growing up the hill from my house, in land set aside for new houses. Actually, it was […]
Okanagan Okanogan 