blog.kennypearce.net

I see you have a link to the Zapatopi site (http://zapatopi.net/cascadia.html) which is a cute parody of Cascadia, but at this time we need a serious dialogue as to where is Cascadia and what it means. Many people often think Cascadia is based on the political borders of the USA and Canada and many uneducated frustrated "Democrats" think Cascadia is only the blue states or even blue counties of the last two presidential elections. Cascadia is not current shallow political rhetoric of "blue" and "red" Amerikans. Cascadia is a region, collection of cultures and other historically shared traits that reflect the uniqueness of the bioregion called Cascadia. This bioregion stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide (the Rocky Mountians where on the western slopes the spring run off flows towards the Pacific) and from the Alaskan Panhandle to the north shores of the Bay Area.
Cascadia is geographically the Columbia River Watershed & the area around the Cascade Range. The Scottish naturalist David Douglas named the Cascade mountain range after the powerful waterfalls that carved out this land & gave it so much biomass. One of the earliest written descriptions of the region having shared cultural traits was written by J.M.R. Le Jeune in his "Chinook Rudiments" (published on May 3rd 1924) about the shared cultures of Chinook Illahee (Cascadia) using Chinook Jargon as a shared language. He describes the geographical placement of the use of Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa) and a partical glimpse of the demographics of who were the Chinook Jargon speakers of the time:

"Chinook, for a century the International Language of the Pacific Coast, from Northern California to Alaska, from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains."

"Gradually took shape between 1790 and 1810, becoming t(h)e necessary means of intercourse between natives of twenty-seven different tribes speaking as many different langauges, as well as between natives, whites and orientals."

So as we begin our rediscovery of Cascadia or Chinook Illahee let us not be seduced by the limited and non imaginative confides of US-American politics. Let us be the mid-wives of a Cascadia whose Mother is Mother Earth/Mother Nature. Let our assistance in of this rebirth be in the footsteps of Respect, Reverence and Responsablity for Ecology, Equality and Equity.