Successful
Negotiations in De-Mining Treaty
One month ago, representatives from the Republic of Oregon and Enchewana met at a neutral site of Whilshud [1] in Whuljia to discuss terms for a diplomatic treaty on arranging agriculture exports and de-mining the lower Columbia and Snake rivers. This makes history as the first non-military one-to-one diplomatic agreement between the two countries in their century and a half long history, which has spanned multiple wars and skirmishes.
This treaty, christened the Oregon-Enchewanian People’s Friendship Treaty, was born in tragedy. Two years ago, three Oregonians were killed including two children, and five more injured by a sea mine three miles upriver from the town of Pambrun[2] on the Oregon-Enchewana border. International observers have estimated that since the 1970s several thousand sea mines have been placed in these waters, violating Clause 6 of the 1962 International convention on the legitimate usage of sea mines, which states that they must be removed upon the conclusion of war. While Oregon and Enchewana have not officially been at war since 1958, occasional skirmishes have prompted both governments to until recently claim that the positioning of mines and other defenses on either side of the river are necessary for deterrence.
The election of progressive Prime Minister Jane Hiroko (LPP) in Oregon in 2010 increased pressure in Oregon to open diplomatic relations with its northern neighbor. Hiroko first sent overtures to P’na in 2015, but was rejected. It was only after the repeated overtures of Hiroko’s Successor Charles Bennet that Enchewana was brought to the negotiating table. Even this treaty, and the cooperation that will hopefully follow will not likely warm relations between the two counties, which have never been amiable. Despite this, there is a small yet growing movement that seeks further relations with Enchewana and Whuljia, championed mostly by the political internationalists of the Liberal Patriotic and Konomoxt-American parties.
Enchewana has seen its own reformist movement come to prominence. The process of choosing a leader at P’na is mostly shrouded in secrecy, but in 2009 it produced Smaqhichen, both the youngest ever Hiyas Yantcha at 28 but also the first non-Liskashmen [3], coming from the once-marginalized Skitswash people. Smaqhichen has repeatedly attempted to ‘open up’ Enchewana, negotiating trade deals with both the United States and Whuljia, and sending out embassies to many countries in the Americas and Asia. One of the main priorities of his government has been the promotion of Enchewanean agriculture and the creation of an export economy around it, which may be the main reason he was brought to the meeting. His opinions of Oregon are not high, however. In 2012, on the 150th anniversary of the Enchewanean victory at the battle of Olmstead’s Hill, he stated in an address that “To negotiate with the Skwinthem [4](Chinuk word for White people) is to desecrate the graves of my fathers, to destroy their spirits that live inside me.” Despite this, he still came willingly to the table.
By all accounts, the diplomatic meeting was rather productive. Both parties were housed at either end of the city, and were brought together with their own guards and a detachment of Whuljian military peacekeepers to keep order. It started off poorly, with a member of the Enchewanian delegation dryly noting that Whilshud only existed as a regional center because all other villages in the region were destroyed by the Northern Campaign of 1861-62. MP Gale Davis of Oregon countered with accusations of war crimes in Walla Walla during the ‘58 war, and the meeting briefly devolved into chaos until Bennet was able to return it to order. By the end of the meeting, both parties agreed to create a joint task force to sweep the entire length of the Oregon-Enchewana border of mines within two years, and at ‘a time most favorable for each party’ begin shipment of agricultural goods from the border territories. The latter move has been welcomed by the Global Authority for Agricultural Production and Commerce, who has in recent years been instrumental in arranging transport of agricultural products through trade barriers.
Both Bennet and Smaqhichen were appreciative of the talks. The former gave a speech upon his arrival in Oregon city, stating that “We have secured another of our borders, and at the same time gained a new outlet for our agricultural exports. I have spoken at length with the leader of Enchewana, and we have agreed on our common vision for a peaceful future.” The latter reportedly spoke in a wavefield address to P’na that “We have secured a future for the prosperity of our farmers. Let us hope for peace.” Pundits in Oregon and in Whuljia hope that peaceful relations between the two countries can be maintained in the future.
However, the talks produced a loud and vitriolic relation from many, especially in Oregon. Upon Bennet’s return to Oregon City, he was met with a large crowd outside the capitol building protesting the decision. Signs with ‘Death to the Indian, ‘Our Oregon Forever,’ and ‘ad ultimum,’ the former motto of Oregon. Upon being met with police, the crowd became incensed and began hurling clods of dirt and parts of bricks, upon which they were beaten back and scattered. A dozen were arrested, and one officer was injured. Members of the Nawitca Tilixams Oregon (NTO), a ultra-nationalist party, threatened to walk out of parliament unless the protestors were immediately released, and raised a motion to condemn the negotiations, which failed 13-122 (All NTO MPs and two Conservatives voted for). The NTO has been repeatedly denounced by those across the political spectrum as a supremacist and racist organization, but they maintain a substantial voter base, garnering over 300,000 votes in the most recent elections. Only time will tell if these negotiations will mark a new reality in relations between the two countries, or will be an exception to a pattern of violence and division.
- James Xhlud, correspondent, Sxeiemel Daily, June 5th 2017
What is a nation? It seems like an easy question. When we look at the map, we see some 250-odd blobs of color, each with a name and flag and little star for the capital. Each is supposedly a state that has a people it watches over with its armies and police and even sometimes gains the ‘consent of the governed’ from democratic elections. Above all the talk about hierarchies or monopolies of force it’s but another form of political organization. It’s the ‘another’ that’s interesting.
In the study of history, it’s all too tempting to imagine all our rules of the present have applied neatly and evenly to not just all other regions of the world in our times but to the myriad of worlds of our ancestors. One could imagine the Sun-king’s empire, or the Romans, or even the Sumerians and Assyrians of the first Summer[5] as individual polities with set and internationally demarcated borders, but this was rarely ever the case. This rings especially true for the more decentralized and heterarchical societies that covered much of the world up to the 18th and 19th centuries, where they were subsumed or otherwise influenced by European colonial empires. At times historians have attempted to reconcile the obvious differences between the discrete states they knew and the diffuse peoples they saw, and erroneously assumed the latter somehow obeyed a lower position on the ‘hierarchy of civilizations/ races/ whatever they were thinking at the time.’ That this is an issue shouldn’t have to be explained.
Obviously, all nations are creations, despite the claims of the most ardent nationalists. Two hundred years ago, there was no ‘Oregon,’ just as there was no ‘Rumelia,’ or ‘Ireland,’ at least in the way they currently exist. They were often areas in flux, consisting of different peoples possessing different means of political organization. But at some point, these groups of people, all with their own set of fluid identities and ways of being were merged and amalgamated in an oft-bloody process and became the ‘nations’ that we see now. In the case of Oregon and its neighbors, that process of ‘nation-building’ shared a single catalyst in a series of several thousand organized murders and other crimes now labeled in textbooks by the survivors as ‘The Columbia War.’ This conflict, by means direct and indirect, is responsible for the ‘nationhood’ of four modern-day states: Oregon, Enchewana, Whuljia, and Alaska. But it is often ignored.
Perhaps due to our own less-than-stellar record of treatment of the Indians, we in the United States often fail to grant agency to native peoples in the historical records. The battles won at great cost by Kotaiken and Wewick during the Columbia War are ‘Oregonian blunders,’ while their defeats are inevitable victories. Time and time again, the ultimate failure by the Oregon government to completely defeat the Indian forces is granted to the British or to the Oregonian-American split, rather than to the Indian’s themselves. Most histories of the conflict you can find in the US write that were it not for “Dastardly betrayal” on the part of the Oregonians, the war would have been an easy victory. Portrayals of the war on the Oregonian side face similar problems, placing all the blame on the ‘pig-headedness’ of the Americans or the ‘race-traitor’ British. This is, in my view, an unfair depiction of the conflict. The existence of Whuljia and Enchewana (and to an extent, Alaska) today are due almost entirely to the decisive action of certain individual Indians, without whom the war would have been lost and their lands and peoples destroyed, as happened elsewhere across the Americas. This history will attempt to tell the story of the people, as well as the more lauded Oregonian, American, and British men and women who fought and died for the identity of their nation.
At a first glance, the Columbian War is far outshone by the horror of other nationalist conflicts. Compared to the millions dead on the Rhine in the 50s, or the killing fields of Alwar, the war seems trite in comparison. The numbers of the dead should be put into comparison. Estimates for deaths over the course of the conflict come to from 10 to 20,000, which while low are out of only 30,000 Oregonians and perhaps 100,000 natives in totality. Many bands and tribes, especially those in the current borders of Oregon were eliminated entirely, their cultures gone to the winds, their languages relegated to the pages of anthropology; even the greatest excesses of Savarkar’s regime failed at that. Today, the legacy of those ten thousand dead have not faded, but have remained to haunt the peoples of the American Pacific countries to this day.
- Wladislaw Rodgers, “A New Look at the Columbia War”
[1] OTL Eld inlet, in Puget Sound
[2] OTL Burbank WA
[3] OTL Sahaptin, from lɨ́šqayx̣iman (People of the Northern Lights)
[4] The Chinuk Wawa (often shortened to either ‘Chinuk’ or ‘Wawa’) language has many words for white people, pejorative and otherwise; this one is in common used across Enchewana ITTL, and probably originates from the Cowlitz or Chehalis language
[5] Seasonal notation, we’ll get to that later
Flag of Whuljia
Civil Flag of the Republic of Oregon (1965-present)
Flag of the State of Enchewana (1978-present) with text in Angular Duployan
Flag of the Tsardom of Alaska (2005-present)
