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Being Here
by Joe Barreca, Map Metrics, September 22, 2025 I have been writing about regenerative agriculture in the North Columbia Monthly for 5 years and for the last 3 years have been writing about the establishment of Hudson’s Bay Fort Colvile (sic) 200 years ago in the Silverado. This summer those two passions converged as I attempted to understand a Salish language word by visiting the En’owkin Centre in Penticton British Columbia. I learned a lot but can’t claim that I know Salish well or even come close to speaking it. Salish is a big language group with tribes speaking dialects in Northeast Washington, parts of British Columbia north of us and even on the west coast. The word that intrigued me is in the nsyilxcen dialect spoken by the Penticton Band of the Okanagan Nation Alliance. The word is Tmixw. but I should backtrack a little to how this got started. In 2019 Friends of the Trees and other groups held the first Global Earth Repair Conference in Port Townsend. I managed to attend and some time later got a link from Global Earth Repair to a podcast by Jeannette Armstrong, an Okanogan Elder, about Tmixw. . It seemed to be a very important native way of understanding our duties as humans to reinforce the cycles of nature. The first messages I reported about regenerative agriculture focused on soil health and bringing it back to life. As studies, experiences and conversations evolved it has become clear that regenerating is about symbiosis. No plant or animal lives without continual cyclic exchanges of air, water and nutrients with the environment and all other organisms. The more variety there is in any biome, the healthier it is. In fact, most organisms incorporate microbes, mycelia and parts of other living things with different DNA than their own in their cells, guts and roots. Tmixw. seemed to mean something similar. The last part, xw. is used in nsyilxcen to indicate anything that is cyclic in nature, which would be basically, everything in nature. The word itself has to do with the land. Jeannette’s brother, Richard Armstrong, is the traditional Salmon Chief at the Salmon Ceremony hailing the salmon to come back home. He reminds us that “Everything comes from the land.” The word for man is sqəiqəitmɪxʷ. See the Tmixw part at the end. We are part of the land. There is no direct “English” word for Tmixw. . Jeannette Armstrong treats it as something you participate in and learn about rather than translate. Some of the many implications are shown in the illustration: spirits of ancestors, spirit of the bear and other animals. “Water is the path to become that place” is a quote from her talk. At the En’owkin Centre Chad Eneas talked to us about water. He pointed out that our economy makes water something other than a part of the land. We pipe it, dam it, bottle it sell it and treat it as a chemical. The water on their tribal land comes down mountain valleys and keeps everything alive. It is sacred water. Salmon only return through free-flowing rivers. I mentioned to Chad my observation that we are mostly air. This sounds like a joke at first but when analyzed, our bodies are 96% made of elements in the air, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and water. Chad pointed out the window of the En’owkin Centre to Black Cottonwoods, a sacred plant on their land and noted that we are continually exchanging air with those trees and all other plants and animals. We inhale oxygen from them and they inhale carbon dioxide from us. We are part of the same living system. There is no conflict between science and the native understanding of nature. Every breath we take has been recycled millions of times between plants and animals over billions of years. We are keeping each other alive. We are saturated with the history and actually the future of every other living being. When I say, “I am still here.” I am thinking “I am still alive on the earth.” When the Sinixt tribe puts “We are still here” under their tribal logo, they are saying “We are still in this place where we have always been.” But if you think of each breath as coming from the plants around us and going back to them, of each drink of water we take and much of the food we eat as coming from the land and going back to the land, you have to admit that we are not just in this place, we are this place. It's not something we have a choice about or even need to be conscious of. Jeannette Armstrong invites everyone to participate in Tmixw. . If we do it consciously with the intent of learning from and regenerating the abundant nature of the land, we can help repair the earth. It’s a little like the Zen saying “Be Here Now.” In Buddhist terms it probably means something more like “Pay attention to what you are doing and what is going on around you.” I know if I am doing one thing and thinking about something else (which I often do) I screw up. But if I relax a bit, take a deep breath and realize that the earth has my back and is keeping me alive, I feel at one with everything. Try it. Take a deep breath and enjoy Tmixw. 
For eons, Indigenous people have conducted their activities on Earth from a basis of needs rather than wants.
Our present activities have shifted from the needs end to the wants end of human activity spectrum. Colonizing human cultures have produced this shift that has been prevalent in European white people. Indigenous and people of color have been forced into becoming part of the colonized culture through enslavement, residential schools, immigration requirements, and what colonizers call “progress.” Indigeneity has been plagued by colonizers who have attempted to destroy their culture and spirituality by making them colonizers. Colonization is when a nation or a group of people, like the U.S., those of Europe, or the lords of industry (timber, mining, oil and gas drilling, hydro dams) has exploited another nation or group of people—either forcibly or under the pretenses of helping them—and has taken their natural resources for themselves. Whether you realize it or not, all white Europeans and many people of color have been colonized at one time or another. All humans have arisen from Indigenous roots in their ancestry, however many non-Indigenous people of today have diverged from needs of natural resources to greed of those limited resources through cultural changes that have removed them from being a part of Nature to assuming they are in charge of Nature’s resources. Indigeneity refers to the quality of a people, relating their identity to a particular area where they are spiritually and culturally part of the Earth with responsibilities for Earth’s care. It identifies that Indigenous people have knowledge and respect for their oral histories past down to them from their elders of being a part of Nature, not separated from Nature. Diverse Indigenous communities weave Indigeneity through a multifaceted array of space and time to revive identities and cultural practices and to regain or retain land, human rights, heritage, and political standing. Indigenous people distinguishing themselves culturally and spiritually from those “settlers” who came to their territory to subsequently colonize the Indigenous inhabitants and place them on reservations. The colonizers forcibly took their children from their parents, placing them in residential schools where they prevented the children from speaking their language, cut off all cultural knowledge and contact with their Indigeneity in attempts to make them “civilized.”
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