The Bezaleel Israel Village Collective acknowledges that our eco-village is situated on unceded ancestral tmxʷúlaʔxʷ of the snʕickstx (Sinixt) peoples.
We grieve the forced removal and genocide of the Indigenous people of this territory and the lasting trauma those events continue to inflict on the original inhabitants of this land.
We are honored to steward this land and are committed to reconciliation, decolonization, and building cooperation with all our relations in the region.
We recite this land acknowledgement as a way of showing respect for, and to hold in our hearts, the Indigenous Peoples of the land on which we work and live. We do this in the spirit of resisting the erasure of Indigenous histories while working towards honoring and inviting the truth.
Bezaleel Israel Eco-Village (red dot) is located in ancestral tribal tmxʷúlaʔxʷ of the Sinixt (snʕickstx, Sin-Aikst, Sin Aikst, Senjextee, Arrow Lakes Band, Lakes).
The snsəlxcín word "Təmxʷúlaʔxʷ" has a range of definitions including "the land and all things/beings within it" and Sinixt Təmxʷúlaʔxʷ is "the place where the Sinixt belong along with everyone else who belongs there.” The Sinixt people shared their territory with other peoples, but they consider the area to be Sinixt territory.
Sinixt Smum Iem (Autonomous Sinixt)
kʷu sn̓ʕay̓čkstx (we are Sinixt) pútiʔ kʷu aláʔ (we are still here)
Sinixt Confederacy
https://sinixtnation.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinixt
In 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the existence of the Sinixt people in a landmark decision that could lead the way to rights, reconciliation and acknowledgement of a lost history.
Richard Desautel, a Sinixt resident in Washington State, shot an elk near Castlegar, B.C. in 2010. He was arrested and charged with hunting out of season and as a non-resident.
But his case, and now victory at Canada’s highest court following a 7-2 decision, was about more than hunting rights. It acknowledges the Sinixt as a people 65 years after they were declared extinct in Canada by the federal government.
Syilx (Okanagan/Okanogan)
https://www.syilx.org/
https://www.colvilletribes.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syilx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okanagan_Nation_Alliance
Other peoples who inhabit this region:
Ktunaxa
https://www.ktunaxa.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ktunaxa
Nespelem (Nespelim, Nespilim)
https://www.colvilletribes.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nespelem_people
Sanpoil (Ipoilq or Hai-ai’-nlma by the Yakima, Nesilextcl’n or .n.selixtcl’n by the Sanpoil)
https://www.colvilletribes.com/
https://accessgenealogy.com/washington/sanpoil-indians.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpoil
Indigenous name of a nearby place: nk̟’ʷəlíla? (“Rolling waves”). The name of the area known as Waneta at the confluence of the Pend Oreille River and the Columbia. A Lakes winter village was located just downriver from the mouth of the Pend Oreille, but into the late 1800s, Lakes people lived here year-round. Mary G. Marchand’s mother, Felicity, was born here. The name, nk̟’ʷəlíla?, applied both to the former settlement and to the lower area of the Pend Oreille River which the Lakes people utilized. Upriver the Pend Oreille or Kalispel people used the river resources. The border between the two groups was located at Metaline Falls (Mary G. Marchand). Teit (1930: 208-209) lists nk̟’ʷəlíla? as an ‘old village’ or ‘main camp’.
Source: Mary G. Marchand, Charlie Quintasket, Julia Quintasket, Louise Lemery, Teit (1930: 208-209).
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/...
Indigenous name of a nearby place: ne'əc'ər'ísm' (“Having Kingfishers”). This name refers to the general area of Northport on the east side of the Columbia River. ??’??’??’??? is the best-known name (Mary G. Marchand), and the term may apply to the west side across the Northport as well (Julia Quintasket). However, Charlie Quintasket believed the west side had a different name, but he did not recall it. ?????? and ???’?????? refer to the are above the Little Dalles (Mary G. Marchand), but others say the terms apply to the area ‘right around Northport’. All informants stated that there were Lakes winter villages on both sides of the river at Northport, and Lakes people lived here year-round, but only on the west side of the river. Some who lived here were Mary Augusta and her mother, ????????, Nicholas Gerome, ???????, and his brother, Mary Edwards and her daughter, Julia (Mary G. Marchand, Julia Quintasket). Teit (1930: 210) identified ??’??’??’???’ as one of the main Lakes villages ‘at or very near Northport.’ Source: Mary G. Marchand, Julia Quintasket, Charlie Quintasket, Teit (1930: 210). Note: Copying Salish characters from a PDF yielded corrupt text-- hence the odd question marks above. Refer to the source PDF, for the correct display).
The Sinixt people are complex foragers. Complex foragers are societies, often indigenous, who subsist through hunting, fishing and gathering, and who have a high degree of social and economic complexity. Unlike more mobile hunter-gatherer groups, complex foragers typically inhabit resource-rich environments that allow for a more sedentary lifestyle and the development of larger, more diverse communities.
Characteristics of Complex Foragers
The abundance of resources allows complex foragers to establish large, permanent villages featuring substantial longhouses that could shelter many people.
Complex foragers often live in permanent or semi-permanent villages, made possible by access to predictable and abundant food sources. These settlements can support larger and denser populations than most other foraging societies.
Complex foragers employ techniques for harvesting and storing large quantities of food, such as preserving and drying fish, allowing them to weather seasonal fluctuations.
Complex forager societies have intricate social structures centered on ceremony, ritual, oral traditions and relations, including relations with nature in all her aspects and relations with ancestors. Ceremonies and feasting are regular events. One such is the potlatch, at which respect is given to those in the community who redistribute the most wealth among the people.
Complex foragers participate in extensive trade networks, which foster economic and social relationships beyond their immediate community.
Complex foragers invest heavily in specialized and durable technology suited for their environment. Examples include large watercraft like canoes, as well as specialized tools for fishing, hunting, and harvesting specific resources.
Hunter gatherers and complex foragers don't just simply harvest what happens to be at hand. They actively manage their environment through practices such as "holistic, landscape-scale, edible ecosystem design, rooted in reverence, kinship, and reciprocity with the land," (See The Indigenous Roots of Regenerative Agriculture, below) harvesting while leaving enough to regenerate, ritual burning to increase productivity while creating favorable habitat for preferred food species and no doubt also some active proagation of food crops, at least as a result of seeds growing from middens around villages or where processing is done in the field if not by employing more active horticultural practices. It is humbling to imagine the scale and complexity that food systems can achieve when they have been tended to by experts over the span of thousands of years.
Other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Tlingit, Haida, and Kwakwaka'wakw, are examples of complex foragers. Their access to vast salmon runs and other marine resources provided a reliable, high-yield food source until colonialism and genocide, which includes the destruction of a culture's food system, wought their havoc on the land and people. Settlers first plundered the salmon harvest for themselves decimating fish populations and then finally dammed the rivers, blocking the salmon from their annual migration and cutting off the peoples' main food source.
We acknowledge that Permaculture learns from hunter-gatherers, complex foragers and agrarian cultures and that Permaculture has not invented anything that has not been already known and practiced by hunter-gatherers, complex foragers and agrarian cultures since time immemorial.
The Indigenous Roots of Regenerative Agriculture
By Lyla June Johnston
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780197762530.013.10
Published online: 16 July 2025 Oxford University Press
Summary
Regenerative agriculture (RA) has greatly enhanced global food production and soil health through its advocacy for cover cropping, minimal soil disturbance, increased crop diversity, and animal integration. As a social trend, however, RA can inadvertently eclipse millennia of global Indigenous regenerative practice (IRP) when mistaken as an innovative or novel practice. The underlying principle of RA is that modes of food production can and should leave the soil and the land better than we found it.
Indigenous civilizations worldwide have done this for thousands of years, however, as reflected by prodigious archaeological and paleoecological evidence. Improving soil health, RA’s primary focus, is just one practice mastered by Indigenous communities worldwide. Others include habitat expansion, perpetual systems design, non-human-centrism, strategic augmentation of base trophic levels, methodical application of low-intensity fire, regenerative timber harvesting, and more. The propensity of dominant cultures to marginalize, omit, or misunderstand Indigenous cultural institutions has limited the ability of IRP to influence mainstream food production practices. Because Indigenous practices are (by definition) refined over millennial scales through trial and error, they hold profound institutional and place-based knowledge often lacking within RA. Until the Indigenous roots of RA are fully unpacked and applied, 21st-century RA will lack deeper efficiency and historical accuracy.
The scientific community has identified thousands of examples of Indigenous civilizations gardening the earth and enhancing ecosystem viability on bioregional scales. Research on IRP has flourished despite centuries-old stereotyping of Indigenous peoples as primitive “hunter-gatherers,” instead of what Indigenous communities truly are and have been: influential environmental sculptors and intentional cultivators of the earth’s natural food-bearing capacity on regional scales. IRP is generally expressed as holistic, landscape-scale, edible ecosystem design, rooted in reverence, kinship, and reciprocity with the land. Contrary to popular belief, IRP sustains greater populations than commercial agriculture in many comparative studies and yields impressive abundance. These societies can therefore provide potent guidance for future sustainable food production worldwide.
Lastly, the most important and influential aspect of IRP is arguably not its physical practice but the invisible value system that drives its practitioners. That value system is generally rooted in humility, respect, reciprocity, relationality, responsibility, and love for the land and water. Thus, the simple adoption of IRP techniques alone will not suffice; the world must also adopt IRP’s value system for true transformation.
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Sinixt təmxʷúlaʔxʷ map with place names labeled in the sn-selxcin dialect
The Importance of Indigenous Cartography and Toponymy to Historical Land Tenure and Contributions to Euro/American/Canadian Cartography
The Sinixt First Nation serve as a perfect example of a case study on how an Aboriginal people are currently inputting and using a GIS representation of their territory with proper toponymy and use areas.
What, Exactly, Does “Unceded Territory” Even Mean?
Ethics, Ecology and Sovereignty - The Renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty
Inland FoodWise Online Journal, Nov. 2021
