It’s actually the law of the land: indigenous rights precede all others. No matter that the rule has scarcely been applied since 1858, it’s still the law of the land, and it […]
Economic Viability, Environmental Sustainability and Elon Musk
I have been challenged to explain how my beautiful observations can be economically viable. This one in particular, this beautiful rock melting the snow away. Well, there are many dimensions to economic […]
Conjoined Cultures on the Cascadian Coast
Here’s a glimpse into the nature of ritual, a favourite human way of dressing the naked world in the stuff of the mind. Here’s the world, on Discovery Passage, on the East […]
Happy New Year to You As We Surf Among the Blue Herons
There are a series of giant stone heads laid along the east coast of Vancouver Island just north of the Salish Sea. As the new year comes in, they are great for […]
Saying the Names Shanty & the CBC Poetry Prize
As some of you know, when I’m not exploring the poetry of the earth, I am working for the words as they arrange themselves in similar patterns, also called poetry. Today, I am […]
What the Body Knows in Cold and Light
What is pale and drawn out by light and cold is not dead. The life is within, or, rather, it is concentrated, or distilled. When you walk through the cold, every twig […]
Indian Reserves and White Reserves
This thing came in the mail. For those of you who are not Canadian, this is what colonial life looks like. Note that everything here is an image of something to purchase, […]
Indian Reserves and Language
Let’s be humble for a moment. There is a global culture today, and it is not humble. It looks out through human actors, apprehends the image below through their complex biological organs […]
Practical Ways to Re-Indigenize the Grasslands. Really.
Two days ago, I suggested that the former grassland hillsides of the Okanagan Valley (now large, private expanses of unproductive and water-wasting weeds), an area at least equal to the 100s of […]
The Seasons of Fire and Water
Where water is, there is the absence of water. There is always water, hidden in life. There is never water hidden from life. Even in the absence of water, there is water. […]
Okanagan Okanogan 