In thickness, there is a way through. Plum thicket. In the darkness, there is light. Plum thicket. Even the darkness is light. Plum thicket. Even the light is darkness. Russian olive. Even […]
Dancing the New Year Home
Mallard Ducks Flowing Downstream
What a spirited pair! Vernon Creek I think I will never see a duck in the same way again. Here’s the happy pair a second later, old style. Quack! Quack! Quack!
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 […]
Don’t Young People Deserve More Than This?
Fishing on the Q’awsitkw in Okanogan, Washington They sure do,
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, […]
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 […]
18. Water, Slavery, War and Peace in the Similkameen
No matter what you’re using it for or who you are, British Columbian law states that any water licensed by the government must be put to “beneficial use.” What does that mean? […]
10. A Black Market in the Similkameen
Let’s backtrack a bit, to see what might have brought a man to try to change orcharding culture in the Similkameen Valley, and in the process anger half the people and become […]
3,000 Posts. The Past and Future of Okanagan Okanogan
This blog started in 2011 as a research tool for writing about the environment of the Intermontane Grasslands of Cascadia, especially in terms of demonstrating the power of the landscape to harvest, […]
Okanagan Okanogan 