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 […]
The Red Beech of the Middle Rhine
38. Raven’s Prophecies, The War of 1812 and the Old Northwest
The War of 1812 saw Britain, Indigenous peoples and the United States fight on both sides of the Great Lakes over independence and expansion: US independence to trade with Napoleonic France, recognition […]
35. The Long Arm of New France: War By Other Means, Part 2
In the previous post, I showed how even the simplest concepts of property and individuality from the settlement era in the Pacific Northwest (180 years ago) have determined much of the world […]
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 […]
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 