Lake Okanagan Research Articles

Moving Towards a Language Nest: Stories and Insights from nḱmaplqs

A language nest is an early language learning program for young children from infancy to five years of age. Language nests have the potential to reconnect young Indigenous children to their languages and cultures within the heart of their communities. The first author, a settler scholar and mother and grandmother of language nest children, shares some insights and experiences from her doctoral research with community members who have been involved in developing a language nest in nḱmaplqs, the Head of the Lake Okanagan Indian Band community in Vernon, British Columbia. The second author, an Okanagan Indian Band community member and Language and Culture Lead for her community, describes the language nest in the present day. We offer these stories and words of language nest development to encourage other Indigenous communities who are engaged in their own journeys of reclamation.12

Attributes of Lake Okanagan evaporation and development of a mass transfer model for water management purposes

Understanding the water budget of the valley lakes in the water-stressed Okanagan region of British Columbia is important for allocating resources to maximize social well-being, environmental quality and the economy. However, high uncertainty in existing estimates of lake evaporation prevents sound water resource decision making. To address this uncertainty, buoy- and shore-based eddy covariance and meteorological instrumentation were deployed on the largest of the valley lakes, Lake Okanagan, for approximately 3 years. The objectives were to address the uncertainty in existing Lake Okanagan evaporation estimates by describing seasonal cycles and annual rates and the meteorological attributes controlling evaporation, and developing an accurate and useful model suitable for water managers and policy makers. Results indicate that two sites on Lake Okanagan experienced average annual evaporation of 725 and 835 mm over the study period. The difference can be attributed to spatial differences in surface water temperatures, vapour pressure gradients and atmospheric stability across the lake. Good relationships were found between evaporation rates measured with the eddy covariance systems and meteorological conditions at the offshore buoys, specifically between wind speed and the surface–atmospheric vapour pressure differences. From these relationships, a mass transfer model was developed. Accounting for the seasonal cycle in atmospheric stability increased the accuracy of monthly and annual evaporation estimates from this mass transfer model, but it remains inappropriate to predict daily or hourly evaporation. The study period included years that were climatically typical, so the evaporation observations could represent values close to the long-term mean, but this is unknown. The findings of this study highlight that long-term observations of the atmosphere consistently conditioned to the lake surface are needed for water managers and decision makers to have sound data and information on lake evaporation.

Other people's country: law, water, entitlement

This issue of Settler Colonial Studies comes out of a long-term collaboration between the guest editors which began, in earnest, with a panel on the theme of ‘Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement’ at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference held at the University of Sydney in December 2012. The panel’s topic was drawn from our own work on encounters between settler and indigenous ‘laws’ over specific waters, including Lake Omapere in the Hokianga district of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada, Lake Cayuga in upper New York State, and the Wenlock, Archer, Stewart and Lockhart rivers in far north Queensland, Australia.1 Further, the conference’s provocative title (Materialities: Economies, Empiricism, & Things) corresponded to our own interest in thinking through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within these settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, we were interested in attempting to locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of a ‘real world’.

“There is another story, there always is …”: Red Dog Red Dog and the Okanagan

“There is another story, there always is …”: Red Dog Red Dog and the Okanagan George Grinnell (bio) Amid the startling inhumanity of those who populate the unforgiving yet sustaining world of the fictional Okanagan in Patrick Lane’s Red Dog Red Dog (2008) is a surprising vision of nature that is powerfully estranged from conventional practices of apprehension and recognition. It is a vision of nature that begins from a place of passionate attachment to this desert valley that exists as so much more than the setting for the novel. Lane’s Okanagan is a ceaseless force upon his characters and reminds us that desertification can take place in the psyche and amid social relations as much as it does on the land. Written with a deep understanding of the ways in which colonial settlement turned an arid landscape first into orchards and now a four-season tourist playground that is perhaps not nearly haunted enough by its violent past, Red Dog Red Dog shows readers a side of the Okanagan rarely encountered at its beaches or vineyards and thus reflects on the ways in which the truth of a place arrives in fiction better than it does in the laboured fantasies of a leisure economy. Lane grew up in Vernon, British Columbia, in the valley and hills that surround the northern end of Lake Okanagan, and this novel closely attends to this place as well as the histories of violence that have defined and damaged the Okanagan and its inhabitants. Red Dog Red Dog returns to the Okanagan [End Page 109] of the 1950s and weaves together memory, human history, and the environment into a haunting poetics of loss that speaks powerfully to our own time of environmental collapse and the rhetoric of loss and degradation that has become one of the primary ways of understanding the present. Attentive to the ways in which memory and grief are attached to the land, Red Dog Red Dog does more than inundate “the reader with a world marked by generational pain, anger, and brutality,” although Lisa Grekul rightly identifies the almost suffocating despair of the book (173). The novel’s deep attention to the Okanagan is both melancholic and loving, and its regard for nature often expresses a comforting relationship to the natural world that helps to hold human violence and neglect at bay. When Lane writes of Tom Stark’s childhood adventures in the hills surrounding Vernon, he tells of a boy’s effort to remember his deceased sisters, including Alice, the narrator: “He’d cross the old orchard from Pottery Road and at our graves he’d kneel, in his hands the white skull of a mink he’d found or an eagle’s feather he’d watched fall from the clouds and he’d set the treasure on the stones that marked our place” (51). Against the seemingly limitless loss and violence of the Stark family, the novel emphasizes the Okanagan as a reassuringly durable nature that can survive, recalling how Romanticism turned to nature as that which is solid and steady amid so much uncertainty and traumatic social upheaval. If the Okanagan helps to humanize this grim family history and make it readable, the fantasy of something that can outlast loss is likewise part of the novel’s effort—again drawing upon the legacies of Romanticism—to think through the very concept of nature and the condition of the possibility of bringing it into presence. It is worth saying from the outset that the Okanagan is nothing but this complicated knot of nature and its vanishing into forms of mediation that make its presence tangible and forever lost to us, and in this respect I follow Timothy Morton’s assertion that ecological thinking needs to reach out and ceaselessly map the interconnections between what we too often misidentify as separate: the real on the one hand and the rhetorical presentation of the real on the other. I want to consider, then, how the novel develops a practice of looking at the Okanagan that is also a form of looking away and brings together two seemingly opposite operations: the aesthetic practice of apprehending and a psychological practice...

Isotope hydrology of precipitation, surface and ground waters in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada

Summary Rapid population growth in the intermontane, semi-arid, Okanagan Valley of Western Canada has led to water shortages with increasing debate over competing water interests. Nevertheless, the relationships between the various water resources of the Okanagan remain poorly defined. Stable isotopes of hydrogen (δ2H) and oxygen (δ18O) were used to assess rainfall importance and the sources and flux of water to and from rivers and lakes in watersheds, and to evaluate the origin of ground water resources. Precipitation isotopes resulted in a meteoric water line of δ2H = 6.6 (δ18O) − 22.7 for the Okanagan Valley. Isotopic seasonality in precipitation was evident, with summer precipitation clearly affected by local recycling of water vapor. The 2H and 18O of surface waters were more positive than mean annual precipitation, indicative of basin-scale evaporation of surface waters; however, Okanagan Lake and its downstream river and lake system were isotopically synchronous, indicating that they behaved as a single well-mixed hydrologic unit. Isotopic mass-balance modeling revealed ∼35% of inflow to the Lake Okanagan watershed was lost to evaporation, validating a meteorological water balance model for the region. Highland bedrock was recharged with snow-melt and early spring rains, with the isotopic composition dependent on elevation. Ground waters in the Valley bottom aquifers west of Osoyoos were recharged by irrigation water obtained from the Okanagan River system, with no evidence of recharge connections from the highland bedrock.

Pseudolite Augmentation for OTF Ambiguity Resolution in Shipborne Mode

The use of shore-based pseudolite to augment differential global positioning systems (DGPS) for on-the-fly (OTF) carrier phase ambiguity resolution in the marine environment is investigated. OTF ambiguity resolution results in cm-level tridimensional accuracies. This high level of accuracy is required for applications such as depth determination in shallow navigation channels, dredging, and harbor maneuvers. Pseudolite augmentation results in improved satellite geometry and more effective and reliable ambiguity resolution. The use of a pseudolite can be crucial to resolving the ambiguities in areas where signal masking occurs because of topographic or manmade features. A shipborne test was conducted on Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada, in November 1996, to validate these claims and assess pseudolite performance under field test conditions. A Stanford Telecom L1 pseudolite (Model 7201) was used, together with two NovAtel OEM-2 (RT-20) L1 12-channel Narrow Correlator receivers, which can receive the STel pseudolite signals without any modifications. The distance from ship to shore, where the reference receiver and pseudolite were located, reached 3,250 m. Between five and eight satellites were available during two tests. When using the full GPS constellation and with a masking angle of 10 deg (0.175 rad), it was found that pseudolite augmentation reduced the average time to ambiguity resolution by 35-40%, while improving the percentage of time when the ambiguities were solved correctly in the initial attempt from 95% to practically 100%. Weak geometry was simulated by removing a satellite from the data processing. Under such a condition, pseudolite augmentation reduced the average time to ambiguity resolution by more than 50% and resulted in a significant improvement in ambiguity resolution reliability.

GPS Augmentation with Pseudolites for Navigation in Constricted Waterways

This paper investigates the use of portable groundbased transmitters, or pseudolites (PLs) (pseudosatellites), to augment the existing space-borne GPS satellite constellation, with emphasis on the marine environment. A simulation analysis is conducted to investigate the effect of increasing mask angle on GPS availability, accuracy, and reliability measures. Up to three PLs at various locations are then introduced in the simulation to illustrate the improvements in performance. Finally, results from a field test conducted with one PL on Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada, are presented. As expected, the use of a shorebased PL increased the number of observations and improved the availability of GPS. With appropriate estimation of the multipath component between the PL and the reference receiver, it was found that the accuracy of the DGPS position solution for the PL-augmented configuration was consistently better than that of the unaugmented GPS constellation. The use of a PL also improved the fault detection capability. An intentionally induced error on the remote receiver’s pseudorange measurement to a satellite was detected after the error reached 7.75 m for the unaugmented GPS constellation and 4.75 m for the PL-augmented constellation. The resulting horizontal errors were 9.4 m and 3.7 m, respectively.

Carroll Aikins and the Home Theatre

Carroll Aikins founded the Home Theatre in Naramata on Lake Okanagan in British Columbia in November 1920. Having just had his play The God of Gods produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England, Aikins, adhering to the 'Art Theatre' principles of Gordon Craig and Maurice Browne, began the Canadian Players, a training company intended to mount and tour indigenous drama on a national scale. Recruiting instructors from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, he commenced work in his theatre building which was designed in collaboration with Lee Simonson of the Theatre Guild. The company produced a regular season of new works by such authors as Synge, Gilbert Murray, and Anatol France. When the venture closed, Aikins went on to direct for several seasons at Hart House Theatre in Toronto in the late 1920s. This paper includes a brief biography of Aikins, a survey of the Canadian Players, a discussion of Aikins' ideals, as well as a consideration of the practical problems and eventual closure. There is also a chronological listing of the plays produced by the Home Theatre.

Some Comparisons in the Thermal Structure of Lakes Wood, Kalamalka, Okanagan, Skaha, and Osoyoos, British Columbia

The rate of change of heat contents in the lakes and the relative ability of each lake to transfer heat vertically to warm its hypolimnion was investigated. Rates of warming of hypolimnion water ranged from 0.06 C/month in Okanagan to 0.54 C/month in the north basin of Osoyoos. All lakes reached maximum static stability through the thermocline in late August except for Osoyoos (N), which reached its maximum somewhat earlier. Maximum heat content ranged from 18,100 cal/cm2 in Wood Lake to 33,300 cal/cm2 in Lake Okanagan. Maximum values of heat content were observed in late August in all lakes.There is a direct relation between the hypolimnetic warming rates and the maximum observed stability in the thermocline regions of all the lakes. However, the relatively low rate of Lake Wood indicates that there is an external cooling source such as groundwater influx. The late summer increase in volume of the epilimnion in Wood and the corresponding entrainment of nutrients from the hypolimnion to the epilimnion appear to control the amount of production observed at that time.

Crustacean Plankton and the Eutrophication of Lakes in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia

In early September 1969 and late August 1971, the vertical and horizontal distribution of temperature, Secchi disc visibility, some chemical components, and zooplankton abundance in lakes Okanagan, Skaha, and Osoyoos were investigated. In addition, lakes Kalamalka and Wood were sampled only in late August 1971. Four different basins could be distinguished in Lake Okanagan: the Penticton-Summerland basin, the Peachland-Kelowna basin, a basin north of Kelowna, and one formed by the northern end of the lake. Total dissolved solids, calcium, and electrical conductivity within the lake decreased gradually from north to south. Macroelement values within lakes Okanagan, Skaha, and Osoyoos were apparently not substantially different but Kalamalka and Wood lakes were about twice higher in sodium, potassium, magnesium, and about 1.5 higher in total dissolved solids. Four species of copepods and nine species of cladocerans were found with Cyclops bicuspidatus thomasi and Diaptomus ashlandi dominant in all five lakes. Diaphanosoma leuchtenbergianum and Daphnia longiremis were the most common cladocerans in all five lakes. Also, Daphnia thorata was common in all except Wood Lake. Eighty-nine percent of the total plankters in Lake Okanagan were located in the upper 50-m layer. Relatively little horizontal variation was found within the lake but two areas, near Kelowna and in the northern end showed in both years of investigation greater abundance of plankton than the remaining areas. Crustaceans were usually less abundant inshore than offshore. Volume of settled net plankton varied from 8 mm3/cm2 in Okanagan Lake to 31 mm3/cm2 in Wood Lake. No substantial changes in species composition of zooplankton, Secchi disc visibility, and dissolved oxygen in the hypolimnion were found relative to the data of 1935 reported by Rawson. However, in 1969 and 1971 net plankton volumes were about five and three times larger, respectively, than in 1935. Calculations of total phosphorus load from two independent sources of data provided similar results and indicated that lakes Okanagan and Kalamalka are still in the oligotrophic range but close to mesotrophy. Lake Wood is moderately eutrophic and lakes Skaha and Osoyoos showed a marked degree of eutrophy, higher than in Lake Washington, U.S.A. before sewage diversion, or in Lake Erie. The estimates for lakes Wood, Skaha, and Osoyoos were supported by the values of the hypolimnetic areal deficits characteristic for highly eutrophic lakes. The trend of changes in phosphorus load during the past century is presented and predictions are made about the load in 1990 in situations with and without phosphorus removal from sewage.

Twinning in Bighorn Sheep

Twelve bighorn ewes (Ovis canadensis), killed by vehicular traffic in southern British Columbia, were examined for pregnancy; 11 were pregnant, 4 of them were carrying twins. The absence of twins among bighorn sheep frequently has been noted by biologists recording their field observations. A recent author (Woodgerd, W. 1964. Population dynamics of bighorn sheep on Wildhorse Island. J. Wildl. Mgmt. 28(2):381391) summarized his own observations of a bighorn sheep population on Wildhorse Island (Montana) plus a literature review of six authors and could find only one reference to an authentic twin birth among bighorn sheep. The following observations suggest that twins may occur more frequently than published data indicate. An opportunity to examine reproductive tracts from bighorn sheep arose during the winter of 1963-64. Heavy snows forced wintering ewes and lambs down along Highway 97 in the vicinity of Vaseux Lake (Okanagan Valley) in southern British Columbia. During a 4-month period from Table 1. Age and frequency of single and twin pregnancies in female sheep killed by traffic in the vicinity of Vaseux Lake, British Columbia. AGE NUMBER NOT PREGNANT (YEARS)* EXAMINED PREGNANT Single Twins Single Twins 3 4 1 2 1 4 5 2 3 5 1 1I 6 2 2 * Age determined by growth rings on horns (Taber, R. D. 1963. Criteria of sex and age. Pages 184-186. In Henry S. Mosby (Editor), Wildlife investigational techniques. Printed for The Wildlife Society by Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan. xxiv -+419 pp.) late November, 1963, until late March, 1964, 13 ewes were killed by highway traffic. During the winter of 1964-65 two more ewes were killed in the area. Table 1 summarizes information about age and rate of pregnancy of 12 sheep collected and examined by members of British Columbia's Fish and Game Branch in the south Okanagan. Twelve ewes were examined for pregnancy and in four cases twins were found. The most advanced twin pregnancy was observed February 15, approximately 2 months before lambing, which begins during mid-April. All twin fetuses appeared healthy. One 6-year-old ewe, killed February 6, 1964, had an extra-uterine male fetus attached to the right body wall within the abdominal cavity. I was unable to examine his specimen, but it was reported that the fetus appeared normal in its development but was tightly enclosed within the fetal membranes. Observations of the Vaseux herd are limited but an occurrence of live twins has never definitely been established. On June 18, 1964, a coyote was observed harrying a group of ewes and lambs. One ewe and two lambs consistently remained together and in one instance left the main group of sheep and moved out onto a small ledge which provided b tter protection from the coyote. These lambs may have been twins. Received for publication July 6, 1965.

Alterations in Glycogen, Glucose and Lactate in Rainbow and Kamloops Trout, Salmo gairdneri, Following Muscular Activity

Rainbow trout [Formula: see text] years old (fall spawners) raised in the hatchery at Summerland, B.C., and 2-year-old mature spawning Kamloops trout (spring spawners) captured from Lake Okanagan, were subjected to 15 minutes strenuous exercise. Muscle glycogen was depleted in both groups. Following 30 minutes of moderate activity, muscle glycogen remained high in the [Formula: see text]-year-old trout. Liver glycogen levels were not significantly lowered during either strenuous or moderate exercise. Blood lactate levels were markedly elevated during 15 min of strenuous exercise and continued to rise for 2 hours of post-exercise recovery in both groups of fish. In the [Formula: see text]-year-old trout, blood lactate declined to resting levels at about the 8th hour of recovery, and was increased 3-fold following 30 min of moderate activity. Blood glucose and hemoglobin were not significantly altered during either strenuous or moderate activity.In the [Formula: see text]-year-old trout, starvation of up to 7 days duration resulted in a marked depletion of liver glycogen. There was little change in muscle glycogen, blood lactate, glucose or hemoglobin, regardless of whether or not the fish had been exercised at the beginning of the starvation period. Feeding during the period of recovery from 15 min of strenuous exercise resulted in increases in both muscle and liver glycogen levels.