There are many individual voices, male and female, old and young, scattered about me. These voices expressed themselves in two languages, Okanagan and English. Okanagan was unwritten for the most part. But more often than not, as if by some magnetic pull of oral tradition, the individual tribal voices unconsciously blended together with the English voice, like braided strands of thread, into one voice, story, song and prayer. That thread stretched, unbroken to the pre-time and origin, that still lived in the mystery and power of the Okanagan language; their spoken word even translated into English as it had been for well over decades before I was born. The echo of that tribal voice, in Okanagan or English, never disappears or fades from my ear, not even in the longest silences of the people or in my absences from them. —Arnie Louie