This is the Bonaparte Plateau, BC. It’s been stripped bare by logging. The scale of these clearcuts makes size comparisons to football fields seem ridiculous. It’s effing heartbreaking to be here. 1/ Don’t know where Bonaparte Plateau is? Few do. It’s in southern Secwepemculewc. Valued hunting, fishing & medicine grounds for millennia.

You don’t see it from highways, & need a truck to get there. That seclusion has allowed forestry to destroy it, almost unchallenged. 2/

*whispers*

The intensity of BC wildfires is directly related to industry-led mismanagement of forests that has been undermining the land’s resiliency for a century.

Don’t blame it all on climate change. Yet. 1/ For >100 years this land base has been operated by and for forest capitalists. A century of clearcuts, monoculture plantations and fire suppression brought us here.

Responsibility for forest management is a GIANT elephant in the BC wildfire room. 2/

“We didn’t get out of the Stone Age because we ran out of stones, we got smarter” - Enviro Minister @cathmckenna

<best ‘Well Actually, Minister’ voice>

The stone age was a wildly, ingeniously stable and successful human adaptation. 1/ The stone age (really the stone-wood-bone-antler-skin-bark-shell-etc age) persisted for 👉3+ million years👈

Since before we were really human.

Sustainable af, and not in buzzword sense. 13/10 on sustainability scale.

Should be of interest aspiring enviro leaders, Minister? 2/

So the racist pieces of shit who did this are our Kamloops neighbours. Now what? #TRC #TruthBeforeReconciliation 1/ I heard @tult7 on CBC condemning this as “small minded hate crime”, saying he hopes this racism isn’t representative of Kamloops.

I don’t know if I can be as generous as Kukpi7 Ignace. The racism is real and everyday and ingrained. In Kamloops, and the rest of Canada too. 2/

160 years of rampant land speculation and untethered state-led profiteering has finally paid off!

COME BACK WITH ME to 1858, when the BC real estate crisis began... #BCHist #vanre #bcpoli 1/ Meet Edward Bulwer-Lytton, colonial secretary, and James Douglas, the first governor of colonial BC.

BC as a colony was about 5 minutes old when these two kicked off the Great Land Grab of 1858 That Never Really Stopped. 2/

I have an idea instead of renaming Emily Carr’s ‘Indian Church’.

👉Teach the role of these little churches in Canada’s civilization project. In clearing the land. In cultural genocide.👈 #TruthBeforeReconciliation (AGO pics) 1/ The decision to Remove-the-Indian-From-The-Painting is a decolonizing opportunity lost.

Better to learn WTF an Indian Church is & *why* they’re everywhere (📷VancouverArchives) 2/

Hey Kamloops. We need your help. We’d like to honour Kamloops veterans on memorial street signs this year, to mark the century since the end of WWI.

Can I have a word about remembrance? Honour? Respect? And yes, money. 1/ Kamloops Heritage Commission planned to replace about 50 signs this year, adding poppies to streets named for fallen WWI soldiers.

But city won’t pay the $8,500. Council opted to pay ZERO dollars and drag it out over a decade (watch here at abt 2:07 bit.ly/2s8WcRe) 2/

A shameful, self-serving manipulation of the church/state division.

YOUR country signed up THIS church to enact a cultural genocide on its own citizens, but asking them to apologize for it crosses some line for you?

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And to suggest that this is just some issue of principle about relationships between government and faith communities is BEYOND disingenuous.

Canada and the Catholic Church have shared histories—and shared shame—that can’t be ignored or evaded.

This is a story about how Indian Reserves were established in BC. It lacks honour. It's also one of the clearest ways to make reparations. #GiveBackTheLand 1/ You may be under the impression that establishing Indian reserves was an orderly, top down affair headed by Ottawa, federal jurisdiction and all that. But no in general, and def NO in the wildest west. 2/

Let's talk BRIDGES. Precolonial Indigenous engineers devised some pretty neat ways to span the canyons, chasms, and gullies of BC. Come along for a mo... #archaeology (all pics @BCarchives) 1/ Without milled lumber, cement or steel, before giant drills and pile drivers, Indigenous people engineered spans as long as 150 feet across, hanging 50 feet above the swift and turbulent rivers below. (sketch probably H.K. Woods, 1898) 2/