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 […]
The Power of Two
This is How You Make Bread and French Fries
First, you take the shrub steppe of the lower Snake River. Then you add petroleum-based fertilizer (white tank) and water (six deep well pumps). This combination makes bread. It’ll be seeded again in […]
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 […]
Sagebrush Moose
Blending in. Got a problem with that? McLaughlin Canyon Road, Okanogan County, Washington
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 […]
Heart of the Monster
This is the heart of the monster. This is ?Ilcwé.wcixnim timíne. This is where the nimi.pu began. This is where the people got started. The real people, as they call themselves. This […]
Okanagan Okanogan 