It has been a year now since I started walking into the hills with my camera as a way to write two books: one about energy and the land, and the other […]
A Year of Walking and Learning
Where is Where?
What is place? The question is absurd. The Okanagan Okanogan … …is the here between these two arrows, more or less. Does ‘place’ belong to settlers? If so, to which settlers? To […]
Stopping a River Dead in Its Tracks
When Jonathan Schell published his anti-nuclear argument, The Fate of the Earth, in 1982, one of his main arguments against nuclear proliferation was that the destruction of life on earth would render all life […]
Wild Life on the Hanford Reach
Here is a basic guide to life in the Hanford Reach, the last free-flowing (note: not wild, just free flowing) stretch of the American stretch of the Columbia River. First, the security […]
The Real Old West
When the US Army cleared all White settlers, drifters, and missionaries out of Washington Territory during the Yakima War (1855-1858), many of them ended up at Fort Colville, at Kettle Falls on the […]
There is No Such Thing as Wilderness (Unless We Make it So)
In a land that was heavily populated and culturally farmed for 6000 years, only in the last 160 years, the time of European, American and Canadian colonization, has there been wild life. […]
Gardening With Fire (and Spiders, too)
I went for a long hike through the fire that fried the hills a couple weeks ago, to see how things are getting along, and was struck at how foreign fire has […]
Fire and Ants
Remember that fire? Grass burnt to the end of its story a couple weeks back? Only living thing left a few grasshoppers deep into the first stage of the grieving process and soon […]
Writing on Rock
Writing about the culture that has come out of aboriginal-settler relationships in what is sometimes called the Late West, is a bit like peeling a layer off an onion, and there’s another […]
The Other Side of the Coin, or Where Did All the Indians Go?
One thing about life in the Still Wild West is that there are always multiple stories. For example, yesterday I told a story about my vision of the land, which unites both aboriginal […]
Okanagan Okanogan 