Knute “Mossback” Berger is a Seattle-based writer and commentator whose videos appear on Western Washington’s PBS station, KCTS-TV. His focus is the Pacific Northwest, and although some stories are rooted in particular American locations, viewers in British Columbia can also learn much from his explorations of regional history. I particularly enjoyed The People of the Columbia River.

The Columbia is vital to British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. In many respects, it is an important backbone of the modern Pacific Northwest. The river system provides almost one-quarter of the electricity generated by British Columbia’s public utility. Farther downstream, Columbia River water irrigates farmland producing about $3 billion worth of agricultural products each year. Its commercial, recreational, and Indigenous fisheries are also worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those numbers indicate only parts of the Columbia’s economic value.

While the river is important to all people of the region, it is central to the identity, survival, and spiritual traditions of Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples. Knute Berger’s video reveals how long that connection has existed.

While the first Europeans arrived here about 250 years ago, bones of the Ancient One—AKA Kennewick Man—proved that Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest date back at least 34 times that period.

DNA from the 8,500-year-old skeleton of an adult man found in 1996, in Washington, is more closely related to Native American populations than to any other population in the world, according to an international collaborative study conducted by scientists at the University of Copenhagen and the Stanford University School of Medicine…

Stanford Medicine