The tree is a ritual that grounds history at the heart of family life, revealing the duration of time, not its passing. The photograph is a ritual that grounds history at the […]
Trees of Ritual, Renewal and Grace
Totem-Land
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 […]
The Tree Whisperer: My New Book on the Poetry of Tree Pruning
This is a beautiful book, that holds 51 years of my personal tree pruning experience, and a few thousand years of ancestral experience behind it. This hand-made book is just out from […]
100 Years of Digging in the Earth
I bought the shovel on the left in 1981. It didn’t have a lot of a point then. I’ve been digging with it for 40 years now. By the rate of wear […]
Lahal or Illahie or Ouregon or Just B.C.?
If we keep talking about this land & water as British Columbia, or just plain old B.C., we’re never going to get settler culture behind us, but if we change it to […]
Should British Columbia Change Its Name?
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is asking this question. They illustrate it like this: There’s been a national reckoning on place names and the people they’re named after — and some say that […]
X Marks the Spot: Ancient Art Gallery in the Okanagan
I wonder who marked this stone marmot with an X, and why. Perhaps the artist was signing their name. Note that there are two marmot heads looking to the left. For one, […]
Peach Harvest Begins
When I was six years old, I went from farm to farm with my father, and watched as he and the other men in town sliced open peach blossoms to see how […]
Fate, Race and Populism in the Third Reich and Cascadia, Part 5 of 5
For a week now, I’ve been presenting a view of how time and land have a social dimension. Sometimes Being Social Means Backing Away That was my yesterday. Today, I will conclude […]
Fate, Race and Populism in the Third Reich and Cascadia, Part 4 of 5
Two days ago, I took you to the Nimiipu’u and Yakama homelands, to show you the oldest inhabited region in the Americas, as an introduction to a discussion of fate and time […]
Okanagan Okanogan 