This is the second post in the series The Land is Never Silenced: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Literature in Canada, edited by Sabrina Schettino and Deondre Smiles.
In the dry, translucent light of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, the land is never silent. It speaks through the murmur of ephemeral streams, the radiating heat of ancient rocks, and the wind sweeping across the semi-arid hills. For the Syilx people, this territory exists as a living, sentient being characterized by vital reciprocity, exceeding the static landscape produced through Western cartographic abstraction. This is the crucible from which the voice of Syilx writer, academic, and activist Jeannette Armstrong emerges. Her writing—spanning essays, poetry, and fiction—embodies the land it describes, allowing it to flow through her work like a constant breath and a form of memory whose presence extends across past and present, language and bodies.
Rooted Persistence: Language, Life, and Resistance
Armstrong (b. 1948) writes from a position of deep-rooted persistence. Her biography testifies to the survival of N’silxchin against the systemic erasures of the Canadian settler-state. Born on the Penticton Indian Reserve and cradled by the dual rhythms of the Okanagan and English tongues, Jeannette Armstrong weaves a tapestry of resistance and beauty. Her life’s work emerges as a sacred response to the voices of the Elders, shaped by a commitment to banish the shadows of tyranny through the affirmation of the worth of her people. From the quiet rooms of her childhood—where her mother’s love for books met her father’s vivid Okanagan oratory—Armstrong emerged as a linguistic bridge-builder. After navigating the sharp cultural shifts of public education and honing her vision through the Fine Arts, she returned to her roots to transform the landscape of Indigenous letters. As a co-founder of the En’Owkin Centre and a driving force behind Theytus Books, she has cultivated a sanctuary for Indigenous voices, ensuring that subsequent generations possess the tools to tell their own stories. A novelist, poet, and international advocate for justice, Armstrong lives language as a breathing entity. Her writing gives material form to the urgent practice of “speaking inside,” a breath of the land that refuses to be silenced:
“The purpose of my writing has always been to tell a better story than is being told about us. To give that to the people and to the next generations. The voices of the grandmothers and grandfathers compel me to speak of the worth of our people and the beauty all around us, to banish the profaning of ourselves, and to ease the pain. I carry the language of the voice of the land and the valour of the people and I will not be silenced by a language of tyranny.”1
Relational Ontology: Sharing One Skin and the Land-Dreaming Body
In Sharing One Skin (1996), Armstrong unfolds a vision of existence in which the boundary between human and land dissolves entirely, giving way to a profound sense of continuity.2
“In all cycles in which Earth moves, so does our body.” — Jeannette Armstrong, Sharing One Skin
Her assertion that “the body is Earth itself” articulates an ontological understanding of the human body as inseparable from the Earth, formed of the same substance, animated by the same forces, and subject to the same cyclical rhythms. Flesh, blood, and bone emerge as extensions of the natural world, participating fully in its processes and transformations. Her thought consequently unsettles entrenched Western dualisms that have historically divided mind from body and humanity from nature, advancing a vision of unity and reciprocity. Stating that “in all cycles in which Earth moves, so does our body,” Armstrong emphasizes a deep interdependence, situating human life within a vast network of ecological rhythms that are simultaneously seasonal, biological, and cosmic. Existence becomes a matter of participation and continuity, while death itself is reimagined as a return, a gentle dispersal “back into the larger self.” This “self” exceeds the individual and the physical limits of the body, expanding outward into continuity with the land and dissolving the illusion of autonomy in favor of a relational identity perpetually constituted through its surroundings. Within this framework, the body becomes “the core of our being,” a living threshold through which land, spirit, and consciousness converge. Its sacredness lies precisely in this mediating role, in its capacity to hold together dimensions of existence that Western epistemological traditions have frequently conceptualized as separate. This understanding reaches its most evocative expression in Armstrong’s phrase “the land-dreaming capacity,” which suggests that the body is constituted by the land while simultaneously participating in its imaginative and mnemonic life. The land, in this sense, dreams through the body, while the body carries, remembers, and gives meaning to the land, becoming both archive and expression of a shared, living consciousness.
Land-Based Consciousness in Slash
The novel traces the political awakening of the fictional character Thomas Kelasket during the Red Power era, mapping this awakening through his return to the “land-based consciousness” of his ancestors. His trajectory moves from the fractures produced by colonial education and addiction toward the healing power of the Syilx community. The closing affirmation: “I learned how important and how precious I was. I was necessary,” constitutes a radical act of repair. Within a society that tells Indigenous youth they are “relics of the past,” Armstrong asserts their existence as vital to the balance and continuity of the world. Literature thereby participates in continuance, holding together land, language, and people across the scars of history and transforming representation into an active practice of cultural survival.
Poetics of Relationality: Breath Tracks and Colonial Resistance
In her 1991 poetry collection, Breath Tracks, Armstrong develops a poetics grounded in this relational ontology.3 The poems operate as “traces” left upon the landscape—light yet persistent marks of presence through which literary expression becomes continuous with territory. Identity remains fluid within this poetics, shifting and reforming through its connection with the land until the boundary between human and natural worlds grows almost imperceptible. In the poem “Visions,” Armstrong attempts the impossible task of translating a language “whose speakers have no tongues,” evoking a discourse nurtured by the spirits and living voices of the Okanagan homeland:
We speak in languages
whose speakers have no tongues.
We will come to you,
soft edged in the night
or mirror-image clear
in warm sun noon4
The land emerges as a “theatre in which the spirit realms and the human world intersect,” contesting colonial conceptions of territory as a “vast emptiness covered with dead silences.” This lyrical beauty remains haunted by the specter of colonial violence. In “History Lesson,” the land becomes a living palimpsest scarred by colonial expansion, as the organic pulse of the earth is systematically silenced through the cold imposition of industrial “civilization.” Armstrong subverts the traditional pioneer narrative by portraying the settlement of the Americas as an extractive crusade through which the sacred breath of the “garden” is gradually engulfed by the machinery of a concrete tomb. Animals fall first—“Shooting buffalo”—signaling both physical violence and the collapse of relationships grounded in respect and survival. What follows is contamination disguised as progress: “Smallpox, Seagrams / and rice krispies.” The land is transformed from a source of life into a site of decay, while its natural rhythms give way to industrial distortion:
Between the snap crackle pop
of smoke stacks
and multicolored rivers
Extraction ultimately yields death—”farmers sowing skulls and bones”—until the land itself is suffocated, remaining alive beneath the structures imposed upon it: “breathing forests and fields / beneath concrete and steel.” The poem ends in an image of irreversible loss:
Somewhere among the remains
of skinless animals
is the termination
to a long journey
and unholy search
for the power
glimpsed in a garden
forever closed
forever lost5
Okanagan Epistemology and Contemporary Ecological Crisis
Today’s globalized society moves toward a dangerous abstraction in which relationships grow thin and the land is increasingly reduced to property or “ecosystem services.” The contemporary ecological crisis can consequently be understood as a crisis of the human spirit, grounded in the erosion of the capacity for relation.
“I cannot be separated from my place or my land… We are the ones who are dream and land together.” — Jeannette Armstrong
Armstrong’s work offers a conception of sustainability rooted in millennia of observation, reciprocity, and respect. Returning to the land becomes a “commencement from a different place,” requiring the recognition that the land possesses memory and that identity itself arises through responsibility toward place:
“So that is who I am and where I take my identity from. I know the mountains, and, by birth, the river is my responsibility: They are part of me. I cannot be separated from my place or my land.”6
This responsibility carries the force of a spiritual imperative. To be Syilx is to be “the ones who are dream and land together.” Within this worldview, the self assumes the form of a porous and relational entity, a skin extending to the furthest reaches of the watershed, through which individual existence remains inseparable from the territories, relations, memories, and responsibilities that sustain it.
Notes
- Jeannette Armstrong, “Land Speaking,” in Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, ed. Simon J. Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 175. ↩︎
- Jeannette Armstrong, “Sharing One Skin: The Okanagan Community,” in The Case Against the Global Economy, ed. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), 460–470. ↩︎
- Jeannette Armstrong, Breath Tracks (Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace/Theytus Books, 1991). ↩︎
- Armstrong, “Visions,” in Breath Tracks, 22. ↩︎
- Armstrong, “History Lesson,” in Breath Tracks, 68–69. ↩︎
- Armstrong, “Land Speaking,” 178. ↩︎
Feature image: Photo taken by Alice Salion in Squamish e Tsleil-Waututh territory, North Vancouver, B.C
Alice Salion