As waves come onto the shore of the Pacific, they re-create the gravitational field of the Earth, laying it down in music… San Josef Bay, Vancouver Island … along with the gravitational […]
Colonial Poetry Conference in Kelowna on March 17
A Midwinter Day’s Dream
Today, the Vernon Winter Carnival Parade. We are celebrating colonial culture today, with gas. As you can see, Shakespeare was at work in the costume shop, updating all those old scripts for […]
Indigenous Land Use and the Agricultural Land Reserve
It’s actually the law of the land: indigenous rights precede all others. No matter that the rule has scarcely been applied since 1858, it’s still the law of the land, and it […]
Conjoined Cultures on the Cascadian Coast
Here’s a glimpse into the nature of ritual, a favourite human way of dressing the naked world in the stuff of the mind. Here’s the world, on Discovery Passage, on the East […]
Okanagan Woman and Magic
Strange, the things that come in the mail all on their own. There I was reading over coffee, looking over a manuscript about this valley, and thinking about the mail. So I […]
The Power of Names and Stories
Take this (no name, please)… See that rock in back there? That’s this (below, centre of image, again no name, please.): Now, look at the name it is unofficially known by (Sorry. […]
Indian Reserves and White Reserves
This thing came in the mail. For those of you who are not Canadian, this is what colonial life looks like. Note that everything here is an image of something to purchase, […]
Practical Ways to Re-Indigenize the Grasslands. Really.
Two days ago, I suggested that the former grassland hillsides of the Okanagan Valley (now large, private expanses of unproductive and water-wasting weeds), an area at least equal to the 100s of […]
The Seasons of Fire and Water
Where water is, there is the absence of water. There is always water, hidden in life. There is never water hidden from life. Even in the absence of water, there is water. […]
Indigenous or Aboriginal or Both or Neither, eh?
The Prime Minister of Canada, the colonial power in this space, spoke to the UN the other day about the need for Canada to reconcile itself with its aboriginal peoples. Notice that […]
Okanagan Okanogan 