Reading the sky, I’ve just realized, is not a matter of translating the dramatic movements of clouds and light into words or ideas, but reacting to them in the manner of responding […]
Matisse and the Nez Perce
History and (Dis)Respect on the Clearwater River
Here’s Curtis’s 1910 photo of a Nez Perce dugout canoe. This was the low point in Nez Perce life. Over the previous century, they had lost over 90% of the territory, much of […]
Summer Offering at Peshastin
A young bird (or an ancient one) … … needs to eat (or your soul does.) It’s the paying of attention that is the gift.
The Power of Two
This is a land that divides. Or is that upon this land people divide? Here we are on the Colville Indian Reservation, looking south across the Columbia River, as it begins to flow […]
Snake Leaves the Snake
To the Nimiipu, water was the strongest spiritual substance. Note that the snake that leaves the Snake River here at Buffalo Eddy, never arrives at the (older) shamanic figure. That’s because it’s […]
Coyote’s Still Talking
Some cultures are so ancient that they watched the glaciers come and go 10,000 years ago. So it is with the Syilx culture of today’s Colville Confederated Tribes. Once the ice melted […]
The Lost Mission of the Manastash
Ah, to be a young Oblate missionary in Washington Territory before the Indian Wars, when you were the only educated man for a thousand miles, and all you wanted was to stop […]
Be Like the Mouse Beneath the Hawk
This is Pahto, mistakenly called Mount Adams. She is one of the wives of the sun. Look at her rising like the sun over the White Swan plain. We’re a long way […]
Eel and Turtle
This morning, I showed an image of the mouth of Asotin Creek, where the Moray Eels used to spawn in the Snake River grasslands, in the far west of Washington, before the […]
The Snake and the Eel
What is a river, then? It is a stream, a flow, a run, which gives a Rhine, a Rhone, a river and a row. But what is it, when those words aren’t […]
Okanagan Okanogan 