It looks like some deal was struck. In 1894 Frances Xavier Richter left his syilx wife Lucy in a log cabin on her land, which was now in his name… …assigned his […]
5. A Second Woman and Her Dowry
4. A Woman Loses Her Dowry at a Poker Game
In 1958, I was born into the tmʷwulaxʷ, a hundred years after it was enslaved as land and water. I lived first on an orchard above the Great Northern Railroad’s Similkameen Station and […]
2. Why This Book is Talking
This book is a grassland in written form. That is: it is a community of living beings in a geographic space created by grass, just as hemlocks and western red cedars create […]
1. How the Sukʷnaqinx Became the Okanagan and then the Sukʷnaqinx Again
Now, after all the years of this project, a story that reaches deep into American Imperial history and ends in what is now territory claimed by Canada in the north of my […]
House, Home and History
It costs $2400-$4500 to rent a house in the North Okanagan. Really. Look. In comparison, a wasp just needs to find a hidden place out of the rain. It costs an average […]
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, […]
Paul Terbasket’s Apricot Ripens Up
The project to renew the heritage apricot of the Smelqmx, the last survivor of a 1920s program to remove commercial fruitgrowing from Indigenous hands in British Columbia, continues. Every day I carry […]
Race and Apples 3: Health, Fruit-Growing and Poison
Apples aren’t as healthy as they used to be. Race has a role in that. A big role, actually. Poor Joseph. Now he’s a hydroelectric dam. Spanning the Columbia right next to […]
Trees of Ritual, Renewal and Grace
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 […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 