OK, a little secret. Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest of North America, evolved in Rupert’s Land, far to the Northeast, and in a colony called Assiniboia, centred on the Red River on the […]
42. Royalty, Assiniboia and the Pacific Northwest
41. Breaking Through the Mountains and Breaking the World
A terrible thing was done between 1793 and 1805. The mountains were broken open from East to West. Alexander Mackenzie’s Map of the End of the World The mountains had always been […]
40. The Pacific Northwest and Its Borders
Names are slippery. A popular one these days is “The Pacific Northwest.” Portland: A Settlement in the Pacific Northwest, with the ancestor Wy’east in the Background Don’t believe everything you read about […]
36. Alliances and the Mountains: War by Other Means, Part 3.
To understand why the Hudson Bay Company might have wanted to destroy the stock of beavers in the Snake River country, it’s helpful to go back to 1809, when John Jacob Astor, […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 