Riesling grapes are indigenous to the Rhine and the Mosel, but not to the Okanagan. Pinots are indigenous to the Rhône, but not to the Similkameen or the Shuswap. It’s just the […]
Indigenous Life and Grapes
A Test to See if You are Indigenous or Not
The Okanagan is an industrialized landscape. Note the cloned apple trees, the herbicide to kill weeds (80% of the available space), the poisonous fence posts, the wire supports to hold the trees […]
Do You Digest Your Food Outside Your Body?
Birds do. Here’s a clutch of haws that have used frost and sun to break their acids down into sugars. This is the time of year that birds will come for them […]
What Colour is a Cattail, Anyway?
If you would like to visit the sun, I suggest a late afternoon walk facing west in mid-August. Keep the water at your side and watch where you’re going! But, what colour […]
Wide Energy, or Living in the Sky
Remember when we were in the thick of Thick Energy? That was fun. Willow Thicket from Thick Energy. Today, I’d like to talk about a related form of energy: wide energy. Here’s some […]
Repaired post! Towards a New Cartography: Part 3, The Strength of Oral Story-Telling
A map is a device for locating oneself in space. Here’s an old map of early Okanogan County. Obviously, a map also orients one in time. Note as well, that the map […]
A Home In the Earth and the Sun: The Beginnings of an Urban Blueprint
I’ve been staring at this beaver lodge for years. Big Bar Creek I thought at first, well, yes, it’s a good model for a house. And sure enough, the Secwepemc who are this land […]
Indigenous Culture, Settler Culture and Canada: Agriculture’s Highways and Byways
Harold Innis argued long ago … Societies that depend solely on time-biased media are oral and tribal. Although leadership tends to be hierarchical, time-bound societies may also operate by consensus. Since, in […]
What If We Stopped Reading Books?
What if we read the Earth instead? Not to collect it or sample it or catalogue or analyze it or fit it into a narrative we already know, but to read it. […]
Training the Eye Training the Mind
Ásmundar Sveinsson’s Troll Woman is called art, although it is an example of a kind of technical device which allows the eye to think by processing bodily shape in manners native to the eye’s […]
