Sensory access at sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ: Blockages, fluidities and futures

In the summer of 2020, tensions rose at sxxnitk, an ancestral fishing village site, for the Syilx Okanagan Peoples due to a landowner seeking to exclude access to a portion of qawsitk (Okanagan) river. Access to sxxnitk is integral for Syilx Nation building and realizing embodied relationships with the Salmon peoples, which have been hindered by a multiplicity of factors that almost removed salmon completely from the Territory. Sensory access throughout the village site is not only important to rebuild relations with the salmon, but also those with the place itself. sxxnitk remains a portal of relationality with waterscapes from the high mountains into the Pacific Ocean. Waterscapes connect peoples, polities and humans/more-than-humans throughout their spaces of motion. In an era of altered river pathways, intensified relationships grounded in particular waterscapes can help to build relations beyond the structural blockages that fragment the flow of the river and its ecologies. These relationships are important for collaborative healing throughout the watershed. Renewing relations with ecologies of flow and motion bring to question the fragmented jurisdictions that seek to carve up Indigenous territories.