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 is not a static landscape—a Western cartographic abstraction—but a living, sentient being characterized by vital reciprocity. This is the crucible from which the voice of Syilx writer, academic, and activist Jeannette Armstrong emerges. Her writing—spanning essays, poetry, and fiction—does not simply depict the land: it embodies it. It flows through her work like a constant breath, a memory that does not belong solely to the past but vibrates in the present, in language, and in bodies.
Rooted Persistence: Language, Life, and Resistance
Armstrong (b. 1948) writes from a position of deep-rooted persistence. Her biography is a testament to the survival of N’silxchin against the systemic erasures of the Canadian settler-state. Born of 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 is a sacred response to the voices of the Elders, a commitment to banish the shadows of tyranny by illuminating the true 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 the next generations possess the tools to tell their own stories. As a novelist, poet, and international advocate for justice, Armstrong lives language as a breathing entity. Her writing is the urgent “speaking inside” made manifest, 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 does not merely blur but 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” is not metaphorical but ontological, proposing that the human body is 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 do not stand apart from the natural world as distinct or elevated elements; rather, they extend from it, participating fully in its processes and transformations. In this way, her thought unsettles entrenched Western dualisms that have long divided mind from body and humanity from nature, replacing them with 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 at once seasonal, biological, and cosmic. Existence becomes a matter of participation rather than separation, and death itself is reimagined not as a final rupture but as a return, a gentle dispersal “back into the larger self.” This “self” is no longer confined to the individual or contained within the limits of the body; it expands outward, continuous with the land, dissolving the illusion of autonomy in favor of a relational identity that is always in dialogue with its surroundings. Within this framework, the body is not an isolated vessel but “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 what is often imagined as separate. This understanding reaches its most evocative expression in Armstrong’s phrase “the land-dreaming capacity,” which suggests that the body is not only constituted by the land but also participates 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
Often celebrated as the first Indigenous woman novelist in Canada, Armstrong’s Slash (1985) is a cornerstone of the Indigenous literary canon.3 The novel traces the political awakening of the fictional character Thomas Kelasket during the Red Power era, but more importantly, it maps his return to the “land-based consciousness” of his ancestors. His trajectory is a movement from the fractures of colonial education and addiction toward the healing power of the Syilx community and traditional land rights. The closing affirmation—”I learned how important and how precious I was. I was necessary”—is a radical act of repair. In a society that tells Indigenous youth they are “relics of the past,” Armstrong asserts that their existence is vital to the balance of the world. Literature here is not representation in the aesthetic sense; it is continuance. It is a way of holding together land, language, and people across the scars of history.
Poetics of Relationality: Breath Tracks and Colonial Resistance
In her 1991 poetry collection, Breath Tracks, Armstrong develops a poetics grounded in this relational ontology.4 The poems are not mere literary exercises; they are “traces” left on the landscape—light yet persistent marks of presence. Here, identity is never fixed; it shifts and reforms through its connection with the land, until the boundary between the human and the natural grows so thin it almost vanishes. In the poem “Visions,” Armstrong attempts the impossible: to translate a language “whose speakers have no tongues.” This is 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 noon5
The land is not a “vast emptiness covered with dead silences,” but a “theatre in which the spirit realms and the human world intersect.” However, this lyrical beauty is perpetually haunted by the specter of colonial violence. In “History Lesson,” the land is a living palimpsest scarred by colonial expansion. The organic pulse of the earth is systematically silenced by the cold imposition of industrial “civilization.” Armstrong subverts the traditional pioneer narrative, portraying the settlement of the Americas as an extractive crusade that replaces the sacred breath of the “garden” with the hollow machinery of a concrete tomb. Animals fall first—“Shooting buffalo”—signaling not just violence, but the collapse of a relationship rooted in respect and survival. What follows is contamination disguised as progress: “Smallpox, Seagrams / and rice krispies.” The land is no longer a source of life but a site of decay. Its natural rhythms are replaced by industrial distortion:
Between the snap crackle pop
of smoke stacks
and multicolored rivers
and by extraction that yields only death—”farmers sowing skulls and bones.” Eventually, the land itself is suffocated, still alive but buried: “breathing forests and fields / beneath concrete and steel.” The poem ends in 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 lost6
Okanagan Epistemology and Contemporary Ecological Crisis
Today’s globalized society moves toward a dangerous abstraction, where relationships grow thin and the land is reduced to property or “ecosystem services.” The current ecological crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of the human spirit—a loss 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 path of real sustainability rooted in millennia of observation and respect. Returning to the land is not a nostalgic retreat; it is a “commencement from a different place.” It requires us to recognize that the land possesses a memory:
“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.”7
This responsibility is a spiritual imperative. To be Syilx is to be “the ones who are dream and land together.” In this worldview, the self is not an island of consciousness but a porous entity, a skin that extends to the furthest reaches of the watershed.
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, Slash (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1985). ↩︎
- 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