In 1951, there was a move to brand British Columbia, that wandering northern chunk of Cascadia, as “Totem-Land.” Maybe it was a cunning move: to get everyone interested in Indigenous family trees […]
Totem-Land
Two-Headed Guardian On the Old Trail to the Salmon River
The peoples of the Coast have ancestral stories of double-headed serpents, beings of great transformative power. A Kwakwaka’wakw Sisiutl dance mask made of cedar by Oscar Matilpi. Source It would not […]
Towards a New Cartography 8: Robin Did It
Maps are power. We could look at the hill in the snow. And map the slope angles and relationships of the hill (not the contours but flat planes), or those parts that […]
Green is the Wrong Colour for a UFO
And now for the backstage view of the Okanagan, that artwork installed in the channel between the basalt seas of the Northeast Pacific Shore. Colonialism 101 The thing about an alien invasion […]
Replacing Wild Harvest With Mountain Culture
100 Sustainable Paths for the Okanagan: 19 Currently, agriculture in the Okanagan Valley is industrial, in keeping with colonial models from 1858, when water was diverted through Nlaka’pamux villages in the Fraser […]
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 […]
Who Will Decide Claims for This Land
White folks make land claims, too, even right next to the sacred hills of the Sinlahekin. It’s not just for the Sinlahekin, or the Methow, over the hill in the distance. If […]
Whose Land is This Anyway?
No-one’s. The question is absurd. It’s not land. It’s earth. One can ask for room, not ownership. You can’t own Earth. She gives everyone room. A request for land is a request […]
A Short History of Whiteness in Cascadia
It’s not a physical thing. Apricot in Her White Gown White is a tricky, racial word. Here’s a small piece of a meditation on it from my book in progress, Commonage: The […]
We Are Not At War
When you live on the earth, in the earth and with the earth, culture is shared between creatures, their spirits and their energies, in a relationship built of balancing energy flows, always […]
Okanagan Okanogan 