A vital part of the history of the Pacific Northwest is the concept of how your body relates to it culturally as a body among other bodies. This is not the same […]
37. A Land of Gifts
33. You Say Skaha, I say Sqexeʔ
The Okanagan Valley, a European space since 1859, hasn’t shed its colonial roots. Becoming a part of Canada in 1871 didn’t do a whole lot about that, partly because when you colonize […]
17. How to Enslave the Land and the Water if You Are British: a Guide for Colonists
This is the fourth in a series of notes on the practice of transferring human slavery to land slavery. This one is a compound method that includes a fair bit of human […]
A Young Black Widow and Her Beau
Dancing in the sun. Among the lettuce seeds caught on their way to the stars. A slow dance. Tra-la-la. In three dimensions, yet. That all took an hour. When the sun went […]
11. Why I Do Not Call This a Canadian Story
You have probably noticed that I live in what is usually called “Canada”, a country claiming the northern half of North America. You’ve probably guessed that I travel on a Canadian passport. […]
6. Converting tmxʷulaxʷ into “Land” & “Person” and then Property
After watching the dowries of two women, Lucy Simla and Florence Louden, become transformed into ownership over the last 2 posts, today we’ll take a bit of time to track the continued […]
5. A Second Woman and Her Dowry
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 […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 