In 1923, Paul Terbasket went to jail for contempt of court for using siwiɬk, his ancestor, to irrigate the fruit trees at his inheritance, the story called Blind Creek. siwiɬk, a spirit […]
7. Frustrations All Around
6. Converting tmxʷulaxʷ into “Land” & “Person” and then Property
After watching the dowries of two women, Lucy Simla and Florence Louden, become transformed into ownership over the last 2 posts, today we’ll take a bit of time to track the continued […]
5. A Second Woman and Her Dowry
It looks like some deal was struck. In 1894 Frances Xavier Richter left his syilx wife Lucy in a log cabin on her land, which was now in his name… …assigned his […]
4. A Woman Loses Her Dowry at a Poker Game
In 1958, I was born into the tmʷwulaxʷ, a hundred years after it was enslaved as land and water. I lived first on an orchard above the Great Northern Railroad’s Similkameen Station and […]
3. How to Steal Water
At first, there was the ancestor called siwɬkʷ, who nourishes animals, plants and people. siwɬkʷ This is a spiritual force, like field mice, red osier dogwoods, golden eagles, or the peach leaf […]
2. Why This Book is Talking
This book is a grassland in written form. That is: it is a community of living beings in a geographic space created by grass, just as hemlocks and western red cedars create […]
1. How the Sukʷnaqinx Became the Okanagan and then the Sukʷnaqinx Again
Now, after all the years of this project, a story that reaches deep into American Imperial history and ends in what is now territory claimed by Canada in the north of my […]
What is Grass For?
The way we look at grass says a lot about our world. For instance, from a cattleman’s perspective, the bunchgrass below is something to graze. From a longer perspective, it is something […]
The World is Simple, and Then There Are Crows
There are, for example, circles. You can see one below, above the Brecon Beacons in Wales, high up. Before we give a good modern stab at explaining it as the Moon, we […]
Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and Love
This is the 19th Century. A waterfall gardened to be a little Africa in Devon, England, a beautiful nod to colonial power, wealth and Empire. Think of it as a living postcard, […]
Okanagan Okanogan 