Commonwealth of Cascadia

Cascadia is a Commonwealth of the United Kingdom of America on the Pacific coast, admitted in 1859 as a single polity made out of two territories that had expected to be admitted as two. The argument that joined them was the Columbia: a river whose basin, watershed, fisheries, power and transport could not sensibly be divided between two governments that would then spend a century in court against each other. Everything peculiar about Cascadia follows from that decision, including the parts of it that have never worked.

It holds about 12 million people in about 440,000 square kilometres, between the Pacific and the Rocky Mountain polities, with the realm of New Albion to the north and the Commonwealth of California to the south. A mountain wall runs down it from north to south and divides a wet, crowded, maritime west from a dry, thinly settled interior, and the Commonwealth’s politics has been an argument between those two halves since the week it was admitted.

Its constitution is the least Westminster-like in the Realm. Its head of government, the First Steward, is directly elected, which is true of no other polity. It is the only polity in which a head of government can be recalled by the voters, and it has done it. It gave itself citizen initiative and direct election of its two members of the House of Lords in the same reforming year of 1908, and the second of those is still called the Cascadian return by people who like naming things.

It is also the polity that holds what the Realm would rather not look at. The plutonium works on the interior Columbia, taken from a farming town in 1943, is the largest contaminated site in the United Kingdom of America. The Pacific half of the Realm’s nuclear deterrent lies in Puget Sound, a two-hour drive from a legislature that has voted against it. Cascadia is the only polity that holds both.

The name

The name Cascadia was adopted at admission and belonged to neither territory. It was taken from the mountain range, which had been named for the cascades of the Columbia where the river cut through it, and it was chosen precisely because it was nobody’s: the Oregon side would not be admitted under the name Washington, the Washington side would not be admitted under the name Oregon, and the Crown’s negotiators wanted a word that carried no territorial debt.

The names it replaced did not go away. Oregon side and Washington side remain ordinary speech for the two halves of the maritime west, are used in the Legislature without embarrassment, and appear in Commonwealth statutes as late as the 1950s. The old boundary between them is the Columbia for most of its length, and it is still the boundary of the Commonwealth’s two great universities, its two bar associations, its two agricultural fairs and a good deal of its football.

The demonym is Cascadian. It was resisted for a generation by people who went on calling themselves Oregonians and Washingtonians, and it won because the second generation had nothing to be nostalgic about.

History

The nations before

The country that became Cascadia was among the most densely settled parts of the continent north of the valley of Mexico, and the reason was salmon. The coast nations, from the Chinook of the Columbia’s mouth north through the peoples of the outer coast and Puget Sound, lived in cedar plank houses on a marine and riverine economy of extraordinary richness, with a trade network that ran from the Californias to the Alaskan panhandle. The plateau nations of the interior, the Yakama, the Umatilla, the peoples of the Warm Springs and the Colville country, moved seasonally between the river fisheries and the root and camas grounds, and met the coast peoples to trade at the great fishing places on the Columbia.

Those fishing places, Celilo above all, were the oldest continuously inhabited sites on the continent and among the most productive fisheries in the world. Their destruction in the dam-building decades of the twentieth century is treated in this article under The Columbia and under Failings, because it was not an accident and it was not unforeseen.

Disease preceded settlement. Epidemics carried inland from coastal contact from the 1770s onward, and by the time overland settlement reached the Willamette Valley in numbers in the 1840s, the peoples of that valley had lost the great majority of their population. What settlers understood as empty country was recently emptied country, and the Commonwealth’s own histories said so from an early date without allowing it to alter anything.

Two territories

Organised settlement arrived by sea to the Columbia and by land along the emigrant road, and concentrated first in the Willamette Valley, which had the farmland. Government followed at a distance: a provisional arrangement made by settlers among themselves, then an Oregon Territory under the Crown, then a Washington Territory partitioned from its northern half when the settlements on the Sound grew tired of being governed from the valley.

The two territories were unalike from the start. The Oregon side was agricultural, populous and self-consciously senior. The Washington side was maritime, timber-cutting and convinced that seniority was an accident of the calendar. Both were poor, both were distant, and both were governed under the Crown’s territorial arrangements with an indifference that the Realm’s own historians concede.

The provisional government’s exclusion clause, which barred Black settlers from the Oregon country, dates from this period and is the worst thing in the Commonwealth’s founding law. Its repeal was made a condition of admission in 1859, which means the Commonwealth has never had such a law and the territory it grew out of did. The distinction matters less than the Commonwealth has sometimes wished, because what the law had established, practice continued without it.

Admission, 1859

Admission was pressed by the commercial interests of both coasts, the shipping houses of the Columbia and the Sound, the merchants who financed the timber trade, and the men who expected a railway. It was resisted by the farmers of both territories, who saw taxation and remoteness and had no appetite for either.

The Crown’s ministers took the merchants’ side, and added a condition of their own that neither set of petitioners had asked for: one Commonwealth, not two. The argument was hydraulic before the word existed. The Columbia rose outside the Realm, ran through what would be the interior of both territories, and carried the fishery, the navigation and, though nobody yet used it, the power. Two polities on one river would litigate for a century. One polity might not.

The Cascadian Settlement of 1859 therefore admitted a single Commonwealth, placed its capital at Olympia because neither the Willamette nor the Sound would accept the other’s city, repealed the exclusion clause, and left the territories’ county and municipal arrangements standing. The Cascadia Rifles were raised the same year, and the Commonwealth has counted its age from the regiment’s colours ever since, which is why the depot dinner and the admission day fall in the same week.

The Double Territorial Memory survived all of it. The Oregon side’s sense of seniority, the Washington side’s sense of equality and the interior’s sense that both were irrelevant to it are still live in Cascadian politics, and the Commonwealth’s constitutional history is largely a record of institutions built to manage them.

Railways, timber and the expulsions

The railway reached the Sound in the 1880s and remade the Commonwealth in twenty years. It opened the interior’s wheat country, made Seattle and Portland into export cities of real weight, and set off the timber boom that paid for most of what was built here before the second war. The mill towns of the coast and the mountain valleys date from this period, and so does the Commonwealth’s habit of building an economy on one commodity and being surprised when it ends.

The labour that built the railways was substantially Chinese, and in the winter of 1885 and 1886 mobs in both principal cities set out to drive that labour into the sea. In Tacoma the expulsion succeeded: the Chinese quarter was emptied at gunpowder point, its people marched out in the rain, their houses burned afterwards, and the method was spoken of approvingly for years as a model. In Seattle it did not: the territorial governor called for troops, martial law was proclaimed, and the expulsion was stopped in the street with the crowd already assembled.

The two cities remember it differently to this day, and the difference is not to anyone’s credit. Seattle remembers that it was stopped. Tacoma, for a century, largely did not remember at all. Almost nobody was punished in either city, most of those driven out never returned, and the property they lost was never restored.

Labour, the strike and the massacre

Cascadia’s timber and waterfront industries produced the most radical labour movement in the Realm outside the mining west. The eight-hour day in the mills was enacted by Commonwealth statute in 1911, the first such law in the Realm, and it was enacted because the alternative on offer was worse and the mill owners knew it.

After the first war the Commonwealth produced the Realm’s only general strike: Seattle, February 1919, when the city’s labour council took over the running of the city for five days, organised milk deliveries and hospital supplies, kept order through its own patrols, and gave the city back. Nobody was killed. It frightened the Realm far more than anything that actually happened in it, and it is remembered in Cascadia as a demonstration of competence and elsewhere as a demonstration of menace.

The same era produced the Aberdeen massacre on the coast, where a deputised mob attacked the hall of a radical union in a mill town, several men died, and the trial that followed convicted the surviving unionists of the deaths of their own attackers. The convictions were not disturbed for thirty years. The Commonwealth pardoned the last of them posthumously in the 1950s, in a proclamation that avoided the word wrongful.

The timber unions that came out of these decades built the Labour and Social Democratic Party in Cascadia and made it the Commonwealth’s governing instinct for two generations, which is exactly why the closure of the mills in the 1990s broke its hold so completely.

Public power and the dams

Cascadia’s electricity is public, and it is public because private companies would not serve the country. From the 1900s the Commonwealth authorised public utility districts, owned by their customers and run by elected commissioners, and from the 1930s the districts spread across the coast and the interior and built or bought most of the distribution in the Commonwealth outside the cities.

The federal dams on the Columbia followed in the 1930s and 1940s and changed everything: cheap power, irrigation for the dry interior, navigation to the interior ports, and the industrial base that the second war then consumed. The same decades drowned the fisheries of the main stem, including Celilo, under water that was the whole point of the exercise. The Commonwealth’s own account of this period was triumphal for fifty years and is not now. See The Columbia.

The second war

The war did three things to Cascadia, and the Commonwealth has spent eighty years failing to reconcile them.

It built the shipyards and the aircraft works, which drew hundreds of thousands of workers, including tens of thousands of Black workers from the South, into a polity that had excluded them by law within living memory and continued to exclude them by covenant. It took a farming town on the interior Columbia in 1943 and built the plutonium works that made the material for the Realm’s first weapon. And within ten weeks of the Realm’s entry it removed Americans of Japanese heritage from the Pacific coast and held them in camps for the duration.

Each has its own section below, because none of them is background.

The post-war Commonwealth

The post-war decades were the Commonwealth’s confident period: aerospace at Seattle, aluminium and chemicals on cheap power, the timber trade at its height, the interior’s irrigated agriculture reaching its modern extent, and a rate of population growth that made Cascadia one of the fastest-growing polities in the Realm. The 1962 exhibition at Seattle was the public statement of it, and the tower it left behind is still the Commonwealth’s most recognised structure.

The confidence did not survive the 1970s intact. Aerospace orders collapsed at the end of the 1960s and emptied Seattle of a fifth of its engineers in two years, a bust the city has never entirely stopped legislating against. The environmental turn arrived at the same moment and in the same institutions.

The environmental turn

Between the middle 1960s and the early 1980s Cascadia enacted, mostly by initiative and against the advice of its own parties, the body of law that now defines it:

• the coast in public trust, the whole ocean shoreline held for the public and closed to private enclosure, which no other polity has done;
• the first deposit on containers in the Realm;
• environmental impact review of public works, before the federal government required it;
• and, in the 1970s, growth boundaries drawn around every city and town, beyond which urban development is forbidden and farm and forest land is protected absolutely.

The growth boundaries were imposed over the interior’s furious objection and are the single most consequential thing the Commonwealth has done to itself. They saved the Willamette Valley’s farmland, made Portland the most deliberately planned city in the Realm, and are the reason the housing argument of the present century takes the shape it does.

The fishing judgment, 1974

In 1974 the Realm’s Supreme Court decided Lummi Nation v the Commonwealth of Cascadia, and held that the treaty nations’ right to fish at their accustomed places was not a licence to be regulated at the Commonwealth’s convenience but a property right in the fishery itself, carrying a share of the catch and a seat at its management.

The Commonwealth’s officers resisted it, its fishing fleets defied it, its constabulary arrested tribal fishermen for two years after the judgment, and one First Steward’s career ended over the refusal. What finally settled it was not goodwill but arithmetic: the Commonwealth could not run a fishery in which half the participants were in court. Co-management followed, and is now the ordinary machinery of the fishery. See The treaty nations.

The eruption, 1980

Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, taking its north face off, killing about sixty people, and laying flat a forest the size of a small county. It was the first eruption in the Realm’s modern history to kill anyone, and the deaths were substantially of people who had refused to leave ground the Commonwealth had asked them to leave and had no power to clear.

It has that power now. The evacuation and monitoring law passed after the eruption lets the Commonwealth close ground and remove people over the owners’ objection when its geologists advise it, and the Commonwealth is candid that the power was bought with the deaths. The blast zone was left unplanted as a reserve against the timber industry’s wishes, and is now the most closely studied ground in the Realm.

The crisis of 1985

The constitution’s central weakness, that a directly elected First Steward and a Legislature that cannot remove one may both claim a mandate, produced a crisis in 1985, when First Steward Margaret Crane was refused supply by a Legislature demanding her resignation and refused to resign, holding that a Legislature could not undo a Commonwealth-wide election.

Both sides asked the Lord Lieutenant to decide. He declined. Sir Alton Pierce told both, in a letter that is now printed in the Commonwealth’s constitutional casebooks, that the office existed to keep a government in being and not to choose one, that he would not dismiss a Steward the voters had elected nor compel a Legislature to vote money, and that they had eleven days before the Commonwealth’s schools went unpaid.

They settled in nine. The settlement became the Constructive Stewardship Challenge: the Legislature may remove a First Steward only by electing a named replacement by absolute majority in the same vote, and supply may not be refused as a means of forcing a resignation. It has never been used successfully since, which both its defenders and its critics regard as proof of their position.

The closures

The 1990 listing of the northern spotted owl under federal wildlife law, the injunctions that followed and the federal forest plan of 1994 cut the harvest on the federal forests by roughly four-fifths, and the mill towns of the coast and the mountain valleys lost a third to a half of their people within a decade. It was the Commonwealth’s defining modern rupture and it has its own section below.

The technology decades

From the 1980s the Commonwealth acquired an industry nobody had planned for. Alder Systems, founded at Seattle in 1978, became the Realm’s largest software house; Rainier, founded there in 1994 as a catalogue bookseller, became its largest retailer and the largest private employer in the Commonwealth after the aerospace works. Both stayed, both grew enormous, and both are the reason the Commonwealth’s modern politics is about housing.

The wealth has not been evenly good for the polity that holds it. It raised house prices in the coastal cities beyond the reach of the people who service them, it produced a tax argument the Commonwealth has never resolved, and it left the interior watching data centres arrive to take the cheap power its rivers make while employing almost nobody.

Geography

Cascadia is a polity built across a mountain wall, and every generalisation about it is false on one side of that wall or the other.

The four regions

The Commonwealth’s own administrative language recognises four regions, which are the basis of the Council of Regions and of most of its politics.

The cities. Puget Sound and the lower Willamette, from Everett through Seattle and Tacoma to Olympia, and from Portland south to Eugene: about two-thirds of the population on about a tenth of the land, holding the ports, the aerospace works, the software houses, the universities and the money.

The coast. The outer shore from the Columbia’s mouth to the Strait, the Olympic Peninsula and the Coast Range behind it: wet, forested, thinly settled, dependent on fishing, timber, visitors and public employment, and the poorest part of the Commonwealth by every measure it keeps. It is also, in political terms, the part both other regions forget: the cities think of it as scenery, the interior thinks of it as more coast, and it has neither the population of the one nor the organisation of the other.

The mountains. The Cascade Range itself, volcanic, glaciated and crossed by a handful of passes, together with the Olympics: the watershed, the snowpack, the parks, the ski country and the physical reason the Commonwealth is two places.

The interior. East of the crest: the Columbia Basin, the Palouse wheat country, the Yakima and Columbia valleys’ orchards and vineyards, the high desert, and Spokane, which is the interior’s capital in everything but name. Dry, irrigated, productive, and permanently convinced that it is governed by people who have never seen it.

The mountain wall and the passes

The Cascades run the length of the Commonwealth and carry its volcanoes, of which Rainier is the largest and the most dangerous, standing over the Sound’s southern suburbs with a mudflow history that the Commonwealth’s hazard maps take extremely seriously. The range is crossed by a small number of passes, and what closes when they close is most of the Commonwealth’s east-west road freight, a good deal of its rail, the interior’s access to the ports and the cities’ access to the interior’s produce. Pass closures in a bad winter are a Commonwealth-wide event reported like weather elsewhere.

The rivers and the snowpack

Cascadia’s hydrology is a bank account. Winter storms deposit snow in the mountains; the snowpack releases it through the dry summer; the rivers carry it to the fisheries, the turbines, the irrigators and the cities. Almost everything the Commonwealth does depends on that release happening slowly.

It is happening less slowly. Warmer winters put a larger share of the precipitation down as rain rather than snow, which runs off at once, so the Commonwealth gets more winter flood and less summer water from the same total. The Water Year Statement, which the First Steward delivers annually, exists because this is a political fact and not only a meteorological one: it sets what the irrigators may draw, what the dams may hold, what the fishery can expect and what the cities must ration in a dry year.

Climate

The maritime west is mild, wet and overcast, with rainfall from about thirty inches in the rain shadow of the Olympics to well over a hundred on the western slopes of the Coast Range. The interior is dry, with hot summers and cold winters, and its agriculture exists because the dams irrigate it.

Four changes are now inside living memory, and the article states them as facts rather than forecasts:

• The snowpack is failing, which is the water supply, the power supply and the salmon run at once.
• The ocean is acidifying, and the shellfish beds of the coast and the Sound, which are the nations’ fishery and the coast’s livelihood, are failing first and worst.
• Fire has crossed the crest. The wet side did not burn within memory and now does in bad years, and the coast towns’ confidence that they are too wet to burn is a confidence the Commonwealth’s fire maps no longer share.
• A heat event in the early 2020s killed several hundred people in cities built without cooling, in a Commonwealth where summer heat had always been survivable by opening a window.

The earthquake

The Cascadian coast lies above a subduction zone, where the sea floor descends beneath the continent along the whole length of the Commonwealth and into New Albion and California. It locks, accumulates strain for centuries, and releases it in an earthquake of the largest class, followed within half an hour by a tsunami on the outer coast.

The last was in 1700. The Commonwealth knows this from two sources that had to be put together before anyone believed either. The coast nations’ accounts describe a night when the ground shook, the forest drowned and the sea came in, and they had been recorded by ethnographers, printed and disregarded for a century as legend. The Japanese records describe a tsunami that arrived on the coast of Japan in January 1700 with no earthquake felt before it, an orphan wave whose source was unexplained. When the two were matched in the modern period, the nations’ accounts turned out to be correct in every particular including the season and the hour, and the Realm’s science had spent a hundred years declining to take them as evidence. That is now taught in Cascadian schools as a lesson about evidence, which is an improvement, and it took a hundred years, which is the rest of the lesson.

The Commonwealth’s preparedness programme is serious. It retrofits schools and hospitals, has rebuilt or replaced most of the Sound’s worst bridges, maintains a coastal warning system with sirens and marked routes, requires new coastal public buildings to stand above the inundation line, and has built vertical refuge towers in a few of the coast towns where there is no high ground within reach.

It is not enough and the Commonwealth says so. Its own reports concede that a large part of the coast cannot be evacuated in the time available, that thousands of older buildings in the cities will fail, that the passes and the bridges will cut the Commonwealth into pieces for weeks, and that the interior will be the only functioning part of it. The retrofit levy that funds the programme is resented in the interior for exactly that reason, and the Commonwealth’s answer, that the interior will be the polity for six months after the event, has not made the levy popular.

No such earthquake has happened in the Commonwealth’s modern history. One will.

The Columbia

The Columbia is the reason Cascadia exists as one polity and the subject of most of what it cannot settle.

The river

It rises outside the Realm, in the mountains of New Albion, runs south into the interior of the Commonwealth, turns west along what was the old territorial line and reaches the Pacific through a bar that took centuries of wrecks to tame. Its tributaries include the Snake, which drains Idaho and much of the interior mountain west. Its basin is bigger than several polities put together, its flow is the largest on the Pacific coast of the continent, and its fall is the greatest concentration of hydroelectric potential in the Realm.

The dams and public power

That potential was built out between the 1930s and the 1970s in a chain of federal and public dams that gave Cascadia the cheapest electricity in the Realm, irrigated the interior, carried barges four hundred miles inland, and made possible the aluminium industry, the aircraft works and the plutonium plant.

It also ended the main stem as a salmon river. The runs that reached the interior and Idaho are at a small fraction of their historic numbers; the great fishing places, Celilo foremost, are under the reservoirs; and the compensation paid to the nations whose fishery was drowned was small, late and calculated as though a fishery were a piece of land.

The four dams on the lower Snake

The live question is the four dams on the lower Snake, which produce a modest share of the Commonwealth’s power, carry the interior’s wheat to the ports by barge, and stand between the ocean and the best remaining spawning country in the basin, most of which is in Idaho.

Idaho’s position is that Cascadia destroyed its salmon for power and freight that Idaho does not get. That position is correct, and the Commonwealth’s article on itself has no business saying otherwise. Cascadia owns the grievance: the dams are in Cascadia, the decisions were Cascadia’s and the Realm’s, and the fish that are gone were the Nez Perce’s and the plateau nations’ before they were anybody’s argument.

What to do about it is unresolved and may stay unresolved for another generation. Removal would restore the fishery’s best chance and end the barge route, strand the interior’s grain at the railhead, cost the Commonwealth power it would have to replace, and require federal legislation that no ministry has wanted. The present First Steward is negotiating it with the nations, Idaho, the utility districts and the grain shippers, and satisfies nobody, which is the ordinary condition of that negotiation.

The river and New Albion

There is no treaty with New Albion, and that is the largest hole in Cascadia’s arrangements. The Columbia’s headwaters and much of its potential storage are in the other realm, upstream storage governs the flood risk and the power output of every dam in Cascadia, and the two realms manage the whole system by administrative agreement between departments, renewed piecemeal, never ratified, and binding nobody in a bad year.

It has failed twice within memory: once when upstream storage was held back through a dry summer and the Commonwealth’s generation fell when it was most needed, and once when a release schedule set without notice took a metre of water through the interior’s diking in a wet spring. Both were resolved by apology.

Cascadia has asked the general government to negotiate a proper treaty since the 1960s. Treaty-making is a federal power, the Realm’s relations with New Albion are conducted through other channels and on other subjects, and Cascadia’s request has never been a priority in New Westminster. The First Steward raises it annually. It is not hers to obtain, and the Commonwealth’s inability to make a treaty about its own river is the sharpest illustration available of what a polity is and is not.

The treaty nations

Cascadia contains more separately recognised treaty nations than any other polity of the Realm except Alaska, and the general rule applies with unusual force here: what each holds depends on its own treaty and compacts, and no general statement is true of all of them.

Who they are

The plateau nations of the interior, the Yakama, the Umatilla, the confederated peoples of Warm Springs and the Colville, hold the largest land bases in the Commonwealth, run substantial governments, and their treaties secured fishing at accustomed places off the reservations as well as on them, which is the provision the whole modern law turns on.

The Sound nations, the Lummi, Tulalip, Puyallup, Suquamish, Nisqually, Muckleshoot and their neighbours, hold small reservations, often a fraction of what was promised, in the middle of the Commonwealth’s densest population, and their fishery is conducted in shipping lanes and city harbours.

The coast nations, the Quinault, the Makah, the Hoh, the Quileute, and to the south the Confederated Tribes of Siletz and of Grand Ronde, hold the outer shore. Siletz and Grand Ronde are the nations made by removal: peoples from across the Oregon side concentrated on the Coast Reservation in the 1850s, whose reservation was then cut by statute twice and allotted and sold in the 1890s (see Cedarvale, which stands on ground that was part of it).

The differences between them are not decorative. A Sound nation with four hundred acres and a treaty right to half the catch, an interior nation with a million acres and a water claim, and a coast nation made out of twenty removed peoples are in different constitutional positions, and the Commonwealth deals with each separately because it has no choice.

Co-management

Since Lummi Nation v the Commonwealth of Cascadia (1974) the nations have been co-managers of the fishery as of right. They set escapement targets with the Commonwealth’s fisheries service rather than being consulted by it, their biologists’ data is part of the record rather than submissions to it, and a season that the nations and the Commonwealth cannot agree goes to a court that has the file from the last forty years.

No other polity’s fishery is co-managed as of right. It came out of two years of open defiance, in which the Commonwealth’s constabulary arrested tribal fishermen who were exercising a right the Realm’s highest court had just affirmed, and in which boats were rammed and nets cut on both sides. It is now so ordinary that a generation of Cascadian officials has never worked any other way.

Treaty impact review

The Commonwealth’s Constitution requires a treaty impact review before significant decisions affecting treaty rights, and the First Steward’s annual Treaty Implementation Report is an accountability document rather than a public relations exercise. The machinery is real and it is also incomplete: it binds new decisions, and the Commonwealth’s position is that arrangements predating it are not new decisions, which is the argument that keeps a good many old dams, including the one above Cedarvale, outside it.

Whaling and fire

Two live disputes set the Commonwealth’s environmental public against the nations’ rights, and the article does not resolve either.

Whaling. A coast nation’s treaty expressly secured the right to take whales. The right was upheld when the nation moved to exercise it again in the modern period, and it is exercised rarely, under conditions and with notice. Cascadia’s environmental public has never accepted it: the protests are large, the boats go out to obstruct, and the Commonwealth is required to police a hunt that most of its voters think should not happen and that its own constitution obliges it to protect. Both things are what Cascadia believes.

Cultural fire. The nations burned this country deliberately for millennia, in the autumn, at low intensity, to keep the prairies open and the fuel down. The Commonwealth’s fire law was built on suppression and forbade it. The forests that resulted are overstocked and burn catastrophically, the Commonwealth’s own fire service now says the nations were right, and the law is being unpicked slowly against the objections of insurers and of people who live in the woods. The nations’ position is that they did not need the Commonwealth’s permission in the first place.

The initiative and the nations

In the 1990s a measure was put to the Commonwealth’s voters that would have abrogated treaty fishing rights by initiative. It passed. It was struck down within the year, because an initiative cannot repeal an obligation of the Realm, and the nations learned from it what a polity’s direct democracy could be turned into.

The Commonwealth amended its Constitution afterwards to exclude treaty obligations from the initiative power entirely. The amendment is the reason no such measure can be put again. The fact that it passed is the reason the nations do not regard the Commonwealth’s good intentions as a substitute for entrenchment, and they are right not to.

Why they do not sit in the Legislature

The nations have been offered seats in the Council of Regions more than once. They have refused, consistently and on principle: they are governments, not constituencies, and a seat in another government’s legislature would convert a government-to-government relationship into representation within the Commonwealth. The refusal is the single clearest statement of constitutional position made by anybody in Cascadia, and it is made by the parties with the least power.

The internment

Within ten weeks of the Realm’s entry into the second war, Americans of Japanese heritage were removed from the Pacific coast and held in camps for the duration on no individual evidence of anything. Most were subjects of the Crown by birth. Canon records it as the gravest domestic wrong of the Realm’s modern history, and the coast it happened on was largely this one.

The Commonwealth objected. Its Executive Council minuted its objection, its First Steward wrote to the general government arguing that the removals were unnecessary, unlawful in principle and certain to be regretted, and a minority of its legislators said so publicly at some cost.

The Commonwealth was ignored, as it had to be, because the power was federal and the Commonwealth had no standing to refuse.

And then the Commonwealth assisted. Its constabulary escorted the removals. Its clerks compiled the lists from the Commonwealth’s own records of fishing licences, land registrations and school enrolments. Its agricultural boards administered the farms that were left, and leased a good many of them to neighbours. Its newspapers, with honourable exceptions, approved. The objection was sincere and it was also, in the event, the smallest part of what the Commonwealth actually did.

The first removals in the Realm were from an island in Puget Sound, at six days’ notice, and the community’s neighbours came down to the ferry dock to watch. Some of them wept, and some of them had already applied for the leases.

The return was worse than the Commonwealth admits in its commemorations. Families came back from 1945 onward to find farms sold for the taxes, equipment gone, leases they could not dislodge, and in a number of cases a refusal by the local land registry to correct a title. The courts heard the claims for a decade. Where a sale had complied with the form of the law, they upheld it, and most had. The compensation scheme that followed paid a fraction of assessed value against receipts almost nobody had kept.

The Commonwealth apologised in 1988, with the federal apology and not before it, in a resolution of both chambers read aloud in the Legislature by a member whose family had been removed. The Lord Lieutenant of Cascadia at the time of writing, Grace Nakashima, is the granddaughter of a family removed from that island, and her appointment in 2021 was reported in the Realm as a closing of a circle, which is a description she has publicly declined.

The flood of 1948 and Black Cascadia

Keelport

The shipyards of the second war built a city. Keelport stood on the Columbia floodplain between Portland and Vancouver, was thrown up in a year to house the yard workers, and held about forty thousand people at its height, the largest concentration of Black residents in the Commonwealth and its second largest community of any kind.

It was built on the flood plain because that was the ground nobody wanted, behind a dyke and a railway embankment, and it was built as temporary housing because the people it was built for were not expected to stay.

On the last Sunday of May 1948, with the Columbia in high flood, the housing authority distributed a notice to every dwelling in Keelport. It said the dykes were safe, that residents would be warned if a danger arose, and that there was no cause for alarm. The railway embankment failed that afternoon. The water crossed the city in under an hour. The official death toll was small and has never been believed by anybody who was there, because the flood took a city of forty thousand on a Sunday afternoon and the register of who lived in it was not kept.

Keelport was not rebuilt. Its people were scattered into a Commonwealth whose restrictive covenants would not sell them houses in most of it, and they concentrated instead in the one district of each city where covenants did not run.

After Keelport

Those districts are the whole of the rest of the story. Redlining kept mortgage money out of them for a generation while it flowed freely to the new suburbs, from which the same families were excluded by covenant. The freeways of the 1950s and 1960s were routed through them, as freeways were everywhere in the Realm, taking the businesses and the churches and paying for houses at valuations the redlining had depressed. And in the present century those same districts, close to the centres of two booming cities, have been bought up and rebuilt for people who can pay, so that the Black population of each city’s historic district is now a fraction of what it was.

The inquiry into the flood cleared the housing authority, the dyke district and the railway. It found the notice to have been issued in good faith on the information then available. It did not ask why the city was on that ground.

Cascadia’s Black population is small, smaller in proportion than almost any comparable polity, and the article states plainly why: it was excluded by the founding territory’s law, then by covenant and practice after the law was repealed at admission, then housed on a flood plain, then flooded, then confined, then displaced. Nothing about that sequence was an accident of demography.

What the Realm keeps here

Two federal installations sit in Cascadia that the Commonwealth did not ask for, cannot regulate and cannot remove. Taken together they are the Commonwealth’s largest single constitutional grievance and the sharpest illustration in the Register of what a polity holds and what the Realm holds.

Hanford

Hanford, on the interior Columbia, was taken in 1943. The farming towns on the site were given about a month to leave, their orchards were condemned at valuations set by the government that wanted them, and the reactors that made the material for the Realm’s first weapon were built on the ground where they had stood, using the river for cooling.

Production continued for decades. The waste, in the amounts that plutonium production generates, went into underground tanks built to last twenty years, and much of it is still in them. Tanks have leaked. The plume moves toward the river, slowly, and the river is the one the Commonwealth’s fishery, irrigation and power all depend on.

The clean-up is the largest public works project in the United Kingdom of America. It is decades behind schedule, has cost more than the weapons programme it is cleaning up after, and its own completion estimates run into the next century for the tanks and considerably beyond for the ground. The Commonwealth is a party to the agreements that set the schedule and has sued the general government twice to enforce them.

The downwind communities were not told. Releases in the 1940s and 1950s, some deliberate and experimental, carried radioiodine over farming country whose families drank the milk of cows that ate the grass. The studies came decades later, the litigation decades after that, and the settlements were partial. What the Commonwealth says about it now is accurate and came late.

The boats

The Pacific half of the Realm’s nuclear deterrent is based in Puget Sound, on Hood Canal, an hour and a half from the Legislature. Canon is clear that the Realm’s weapons are all at sea and that none is stationed in any other realm, which means they are stationed here, in the polity least disposed to want them.

The Legislature has voted against the base four times, in terms ranging from a request for removal to a resolution declaring the Commonwealth a nuclear-free zone, which it has no power whatever to be. The protests at the gates are the largest and longest-running in the Realm, have been held every year since the boats arrived, and are attended by a section of the Commonwealth’s clergy, its Green organisation, its peace churches and a reliable contingent of its retired.

None of it makes any difference and everybody involved knows it. Defence is a federal matter, the base is a federal enclave, and the Commonwealth’s only powers over it are the roads outside the fence. The base is also among the largest employers in its county, which is one of the poorer ones, and the same Commonwealth that votes for removal funds the schools that the base’s families fill.

The Commonwealth’s position is therefore incoherent, and the article declines to tidy it. A polity may hold that a thing should not exist, depend on the wages it pays, and have no power to end it, all at once. Most polities that host such installations do.

Constitutional system

The Crown in right of Cascadia

The Crown in right of Cascadia is the legal person through which the Commonwealth holds its property, makes its contracts, incurs its debts and exercises its authority. It is distinct from the Crown in right of the United Kingdom of America. When the Commonwealth acts, it acts in the Crown in right of Cascadia; when the general government acts within Cascadia, it acts in the Crown in right of America. The distinction is not academic here: it is the whole of the argument about Hanford, about the submarine base, about the federal forests and about the river.

The Commonwealth Constitution

The Constitution dates from admission in 1859 and has been amended substantially three times: in 1908, when the Commonwealth adopted the direct election of the First Steward, the recall, the initiative and the direct election of its members of the Lords; in 1986, when the settlement that ended the previous year’s crisis was written into it; and in the 1990s, when treaty obligations were excluded from the initiative power.

Ordinary amendments require concurrent majorities in both chambers and a vote of the electorate. Amendments touching the regions require, in addition, the consent of the affected region’s members in the Council of Regions. Amendments touching the Lord Lieutenant, the election of the First Steward or the bicameral structure require the highest threshold the Constitution knows, and have succeeded twice.

The Lord Lieutenant

The Crown’s representative holds the formal title His Majesty’s Lieutenant-General for the Commonwealth of Cascadia and is universally called the Lord Lieutenant of Cascadia. The long form appears on the commission and on instruments of assent, and nobody uses it in speech.

The wording is older than the Commonwealth and was chosen deliberately at admission in preference to the Governor used by the other Commonwealths. Lieutenant-General here is a civil office in the sense the Crown has used since it appointed lieutenants to govern in its absence, and the choice was a small assertion of distinctness by a polity insisting it was not being fitted to an eastern template.

The Lord Lieutenant gives royal assent, appoints the First Steward on the declaration of the poll, opens and prorogues the Legislature, holds the reserve powers, and represents the Crown at treaty ceremonies with the nations, which in Cascadia is a substantial part of the work rather than an ornament of it.

The office is appointed by the Crown on the First Steward’s advice, which means the head of government nominates the holder of the reserve powers that constrain them. Cascadia manages the tension by convention: no Lord Lieutenant has been appointed from the First Steward’s own party in sixty years, and the nominee is discussed with the leaders of the other parties before the name goes forward. The convention has no legal force and has not been broken.

Grace Nakashima has held the office since 2021. She is a former judge of the Commonwealth’s appellate bench, the first Lord Lieutenant of Japanese descent, and the granddaughter of a family removed from Puget Sound in 1942. She has declined, publicly and more than once, to let her appointment be described as a circle closing, on the ground that the Commonwealth apologised in 1988 and that an apology is not repaid by an appointment.

The First Steward

The First Steward of Cascadia is the head of government and the only directly elected one in any polity that has a Governor. The republics elect Presidents who are heads of state as well, Vermont’s every two years and Florida’s by the whole republic; Cascadia is the only Crown polity whose voters choose the head of the government directly while the Crown’s representative stays above it.

The title was chosen in 1908 over Premier and over Chief Minister. Its reasoning has survived intact and is worth stating in the Commonwealth’s own terms: the office holds the Commonwealth’s land, water, forests and fisheries in trust rather than in ownership, and a steward is answerable for what is left at the end of the tenancy. It also signals constitutional modesty. A steward is not a sovereign, and the Commonwealth was at pains in 1908 to say that it was not creating a president.

Election is in two rounds. Any candidate may stand at the first; if none takes a majority of the whole vote, the two highest go to a second, in which the four regions weight the count so that a candidate who carries the cities and nothing else cannot win. The mechanism is the reason Cascadian campaigns are conducted in the interior and on the coast far out of proportion to the votes there, and it is the most copied idea in Cascadia’s constitution, which is to say that three polities have studied it and none has adopted it.

The term is four years, fixed, with a limit of two terms. The First Steward appoints the Ministry, chairs the Executive Council, holds the Commonwealth’s executive authority and delivers the four annual statements the Commonwealth requires: the Commonwealth Address, the Water Year Statement, the Fire Readiness Statement, the Ferry and Ports Report and the Treaty Implementation Report. The last is laid before the Legislature and sent to every nation with which the Commonwealth has a relationship, which in practice means the nations’ governments receive it before the Commonwealth’s own members do.

Marit Haugen (LFD) has been First Steward since January 2025. She is from a coast fishing town, the first holder from the coast in living memory, and was elected in a second round after a first in which neither pole’s candidate could be trusted by the other. Her government is negotiating the removal of the lower Snake dams with the nations, Idaho, the utility districts and the grain shippers; pressing a housing programme that overrides local objection to building inside the growth boundaries; funding earthquake retrofits from a levy the interior says it will never see the benefit of; and asking the general government, annually and without success, for a river treaty with New Albion that is not hers to obtain.

The Ministry and the Executive Council

The Ministry is appointed by the First Steward and is not required to sit in the Legislature, though most ministers do. It includes technical ministers appointed for expertise rather than party, a practice older than the modern party system here, and regional ministers whose portfolios are the four regions themselves.

The Executive Council of Cascadia is the formal body through which the Crown in right of Cascadia acts: orders in council, proclamations, regulations, appointments, and the certification of treaty impact reviews. The First Steward chairs it; the Lord Lieutenant presides at certain formal proceedings; the Clerk of the Executive Council keeps its records, the Red Books, which are closed for thirty years and are the institutional memory of Cascadian government.

The Legislature

The Legislature of Cascadia sits at Olympia and is bicameral.

The Common House has 120 members, elected from single-member constituencies drawn on population, which puts a majority of its seats in the cities. It initiates supply, holds the confidence relationship with the Ministry and does the bulk of legislation.

The Council of Regions has 48 members, twelve from each of the four regions, elected on the same cycle. Because the regions are equal blocks, the coast and the interior together outvote the cities in it, and that is the point of it. The Council may delay, amend substantially and refer a bill for regional consent, and it cannot indefinitely veto supply.

The Council is therefore the most powerful second chamber in any polity of the Realm, and the cities’ complaint about it, that a fifth of the Commonwealth’s population can hold up the business of the other four-fifths, is exactly what the interior and the coast say it is for.

Confidence and the Constructive Stewardship Challenge

The confidence machinery is unusual because the executive is not drawn from the chamber. The Legislature holds confidence over the Ministry and may censure or remove individual ministers. It holds supply. It does not hold the First Steward’s mandate, which comes from the whole electorate.

The Constructive Stewardship Challenge, added in 1986, is the mechanism by which it may nonetheless remove one: a motion that both removes the First Steward and elects a named successor, carried by an absolute majority of both chambers sitting together. Supply may not be withheld as a means of forcing a resignation, a rule written directly out of 1985.

The Challenge has been moved four times and has never carried. Its critics say it makes a bad First Steward unremovable for four years. Its defenders say that a polity which elects its executive directly should be made to wait, and that the recall exists for the case that will not wait.

The recall

Any elected officer of the Commonwealth, including the First Steward, may be recalled on petition of a proportion of the electorate followed by a vote. The power dates from 1908 and has been used against local officers many times.

Against a First Steward it has succeeded once. In 1937 Harlan Voss was recalled over a thirty-year contract selling Commonwealth hydropower below cost to a company in which his family held an interest that had not been disclosed. He was removed by a margin of better than two to one, prosecuted, and convicted in 1939. The contract was voided by statute the same year.

The recall is the most-cited and least-used part of the Commonwealth’s constitution. Petitions against sitting First Stewards are launched in most terms, reach the threshold rarely and have not gone to a vote since. What they do instead is discipline: every First Steward since Voss has governed in the knowledge that the electorate holds an instrument that no legislature can block.

The initiative

Citizen initiative is easy in Cascadia and used constantly. Measures are placed on the ballot by petition, several at each general poll, and a paid signature industry has grown up around the requirement that the Commonwealth has tried three times to regulate and has failed each time in its own courts on speech grounds.

Most of the Commonwealth’s defining law arrived this way: the public coast, the container deposit, assisted dying, environmental review, and, in the other direction, a property tax cap in the 1990s that starved the schools for a generation and which the Legislature has never dared repeal.

Treaty obligations are excluded from the initiative power, by the amendment described under The treaty nations. Nothing else is.

The two members of the Lords

Cascadia was the first polity to elect its two members of the House of Lords directly, in 1908, and the practice is called the Cascadian return. The members are elected Commonwealth-wide at the same poll as the First Steward.

By convention, which has held since the 1920s, one comes from the coast side of the crest and one from the interior. The convention is enforced by nothing except the parties’ fear of what the interior would say, and it has therefore held better than most rules that are written down.

The courts

Cascadia’s judges are appointed by the Lord Lieutenant on the recommendation of an independent judicial commission, as elsewhere in the Realm, and Cascadia’s occasional enthusiasts for electing them have never got the proposal past the Council of Regions.

The Commonwealth’s courts carry an unusual load because so much of Cascadian life is litigated: the fishery, the water year, the growth boundaries, the initiative measures, the Hanford agreements and the treaty impact reviews. The Commonwealth’s Supreme Court sits at Olympia, hears more constitutional business than any other polity’s court of comparable size, and has developed a body of public-reasons doctrine, requiring administrative decisions to be explained in writing at the time they are made, that several other polities have borrowed.

Counties and local government

Counties are the basic unit of administration and were inherited from the two territories without alteration at admission. They are governed by elected commissioners, run the roads, the sheriffs, the registries and most rural services, and in the interior they are the level of government that people mean when they say government.

Municipalities hold home-rule authority under their charters, which in the cities is substantial and in a town of two thousand amounts to the streets, the water and the planning. The Commonwealth’s largest cities run their own police; smaller places contract with the county sheriff or are covered by the Commonwealth Constabulary.

Special districts are everywhere and are the distinctive Cascadian form: irrigation districts, diking districts, port districts, fire districts, school districts, and above all the public utility districts, customer-owned and run by elected commissioners, which generate and distribute a large share of the Commonwealth’s electricity. A PUD commissioner’s election is a low-turnout affair that decides who controls a dam, and the Commonwealth’s politics of power is conducted substantially in those elections.

Growth boundaries bind every municipality. A city may not extend urban development beyond its boundary, farm and forest land outside it is protected by Commonwealth law rather than local zoning, and the boundary is reviewed on a cycle by a Commonwealth commission against population projections. The rule binds the Legislature’s own agencies as well, which makes Cascadia the only polity whose land-use law constrains its own government by default.

Ports are their own governments here. The port districts of the Sound and the Columbia are elected bodies with taxing powers and considerable independence, they own the container terminals, the grain elevators, the industrial land and several of the airports, and their commissioners are among the most powerful officials in the Commonwealth that most Cascadians cannot name.

Politics

The parties

All six federal parties organise in Cascadia, and the Commonwealth’s shape is its own.

The Labour and Social Democratic Party was the Commonwealth’s governing instinct for two generations on the strength of the timber and waterfront unions, and it is now strongest in the Sound and Willamette cities, where its base is public employees, the trades and the service unions rather than the mills.

The Conservative and Crown Union holds the interior’s towns, the farming and ranching country, the orchards’ owners and a good deal of the coast’s business.

The Liberal Federal Democrats hold the professional suburbs and the university towns, and supply, disproportionately, the Commonwealth’s administrators and its brokers. The present First Steward is one.

Alliance 90 / Green Realm is stronger here than anywhere else in the Realm. It is the second party of the coastal cities, has held ministries in coalition, and has twice come within a plausible distance of the First Stewardship. Its Cascadian organisation is older than the federal party and joined it late and on terms.

Alternative for the Realm took a large share of the interior and the mill towns after 2016, on a programme of opposition to Olympia, Seattle and Portland that here requires no further explanation.

The Left and Solidarity Bloc is small but persistent, and its cooperative and municipal programme fits a polity full of customer-owned utilities, farm cooperatives and outdoor co-ops better than it fits most places.

How Cascadia votes federally

Cascadia returns 16 members to the House of Commons, thirteen from constituencies and three as best-loser members corrected within the polity.

Its federal voting is more mixed than its own politics, because Cascadian electors split their tickets to a degree that federal organisers find maddening: the same county will return a Green to the Council of Regions, an AfR member to the Common House and a CCU member to the Commons, and see no contradiction in it. The Commonwealth’s two members of the Lords have generally been of different parties, which the convention on coast and interior makes nearly unavoidable.

The interior’s grievance

The interior’s complaint is not one thing but two, and the Commonwealth’s institutions exist because both are true.

The first is extractive. The power is generated on the interior’s rivers and consumed on the coast; the irrigation that makes its agriculture possible is licensed from Olympia; the environmental restrictions that follow from coastal majorities land on interior ground; and the revenue those rivers earn is spent where the voters are.

The second is procedural. The interior is outvoted in the Common House on every question that divides the Commonwealth by geography, and has been compensated with institutions, the Council of Regions, the regional ministers, the weighted second round, that give it delay and consultation rather than decision.

The Council of Regions exists because both complaints are true, and the interior’s assessment of it is that a chamber which can delay anything and decide nothing is a well-upholstered waiting room. The cities’ assessment is that the interior blocks the Commonwealth’s business and calls it consultation. Neither has changed in forty years.

Separatism

There is no serious movement to leave the Commonwealth or the Realm. A fringe proposes a Pacific republic joining Cascadia to the western provinces of New Albion, prints an attractive flag, sells a great many stickers, and is believed in by nobody including most of the people wearing the stickers. Cascadians enjoy it as a joke about themselves, which is the form most Cascadian political sentiment takes before it becomes an initiative.

The timber wars

The decade between 1988 and 1998 is the hinge of modern Cascadia, and calling it a war is the Commonwealth’s own usage and not this article’s.

The dispute. The old-growth forests of the federal land were the last large stands of their kind in the Realm. The mills of the coast and the mountain valleys had been built on the assumption that they would be cut. The northern spotted owl, listed in 1990, was the legal instrument by which the question was forced, and everybody on both sides understood at the time that the bird was a proxy for the forest.

The decision. Injunctions halted federal sales, and the federal forest plan of 1994 settled the harvest at roughly a fifth of its former level, with reserves around the remaining old growth and a scheme of watershed protection that the Commonwealth then had to apply to its own ground or explain why not.

The consequences. Mills closed across the Coast Range and the western Cascades. Towns lost a third to a half of their people. The Commonwealth’s mill-town counties have never recovered their population and in most cases have not recovered their tax base either. The LSDP’s hold on those towns broke and did not return.

The Commonwealth’s own forests. Cascadia holds substantial forest as trust land whose revenue funds the schools. This is the fact that keeps the argument alive: every reduction in the Commonwealth’s own harvest is a reduction in school money, so the Commonwealth logs its own ground on terms it would not accept from the general government, and is sued about it by the same organisations that won in 1994 and defended by the same counties that lost.

The violence. Blockades and tree sits on one side; spiking, arson and intimidation attributed to both. In 1992 a protester was killed at the Elk River blockade when a tree was felled into an occupied stand. The inquest returned no finding of unlawful killing, no one was ever convicted, and the Commonwealth’s inquiry into the policing of the blockades was critical of the constabulary and changed nothing anyone could point to afterwards.

The transition. The retraining programme is named in this article as a failure because the Commonwealth’s own auditors named it one. It trained people for work that did not exist where they lived, its payments ended before the mills’ obligations did, and its principal measurable effect was to fund departure. What replaced the mills in the towns that survived was public employment, retirement, and, on the lake and coast, other people’s holidays.

Economy

Cascadia’s economy is large, diverse by the standards of a resource polity, and unevenly distributed to a degree that structures its politics.

Aerospace

The aerospace works are the Commonwealth’s largest private employer and effectively its second government. They build the Realm’s airliners, they are building its half of the second Concorde programme at Seattle, and their decisions about where to place a new assembly line are Commonwealth political events.

The industry’s history here is one long lesson in dependence: a bust at the end of the 1960s that emptied a fifth of Seattle’s engineering workforce in two years and is still the city’s foundational economic memory, and a threat in the modern period to place an assembly line outside the Commonwealth that was answered with a tax package so large that the Legislature’s own fiscal officers declined to certify its value. Cascadia is still arguing about whether it was bought or blackmailed, and the honest answer is that a polity whose largest employer can credibly leave has no third option.

Software, retail and logistics

Alder Systems (1978) and Rainier (1994) are the two largest technology companies in the Realm outside California, both at Seattle, and between them they employ more people in the Commonwealth than the aerospace works.

Their effects are the modern Cascadian question. They pay well, which has raised the price of housing beyond the reach of the people who teach their children and staff their hospitals. They are hard to tax, because the Commonwealth’s revenue system was built for timber and wheat, and every attempt to reach them has been fought to the Supreme Court or repealed by initiative. And the wealth is concentrated in one metropolitan region of a polity with four.

Ports and Pacific trade

The container ports of the Sound and the grain and bulk ports of the Columbia are the Realm’s Pacific gate. The trade is with Japan, the Empire of China, Korea and the Pacific realms, and it is the reason the Commonwealth’s economic interest in the Realm’s Pacific policy is more direct than any other polity’s except Hawaii’s and California’s.

The Columbia barge route carries the interior’s wheat four hundred miles to the sea, is the cheapest freight in the Commonwealth, and depends on the four lower Snake dams whose removal is under negotiation. The wheat growers’ opposition to removal is therefore not sentiment about dams: it is the difference between barge rates and rail rates.

Power and the data centres

Cascadia has the cheapest electricity in the Realm and the cleanest, and the two facts have the same cause. Hydropower carried the Commonwealth’s industrial century, and the surplus now attracts data centres to the interior, where the power is generated and the land is cheap.

The interior’s view of them is its old grievance in modern dress: they take power made on interior rivers, pay rates negotiated against other polities’ offers, employ a few dozen people each, and leave the towns with a tax abatement and a substation. The Commonwealth’s view is that the alternative was selling the power out of the Commonwealth altogether. Both are true, and the argument is about the next ones rather than the built ones.

Agriculture

The Willamette is the Realm’s principal cool-climate wine country and the Commonwealth’s richest farmland, protected from subdivision by the growth boundaries and worth more per acre because of them. The Yakima and the Columbia basin grow apples, cherries, hops and wine grapes on water the dams deliver, and supply a large share of the Realm’s fruit. The Palouse grows wheat. The coast has dairy and cranberries, and the Sound’s valleys, what is left of them, grow bulbs, berries and vegetables between subdivisions.

The labour is substantially Latino, as it has been since the middle of the last century, and the interior’s orchard towns are now among the most Spanish-speaking places in the Realm outside the south-west, which the interior’s own politics has not entirely caught up with.

Fishing and the Alaska fleet

The Commonwealth’s fishing fleet works the Sound, the coast and, in much larger part, the waters of the Kingdom of Alaska. Seattle is Alaska’s port: the crab and pollock fleets are based there, financed there, and crewed substantially from there, and the freight that supplies Alaska’s coast leaves from there.

Alaska’s view of this arrangement is that its economy is transacted in another polity’s city, and it is not a friendly view. The money comes south. What softens it is that the connection Alaskans actually feel is the air link, and Orbit Airlines, which runs it, is a cooperative owned by people who mostly live in Cascadia and partly in Alaska.

Taxes

The merger of two territorial systems forced a single one, and what Cascadia adopted at admission and has kept since is an income tax and no general sales tax. The Oregon side had wanted it; the Washington side resented it for a century and periodically still does.

The consequence is a revenue base that rises and falls with employment and capital gains more sharply than any other polity’s, so that Cascadia’s budget is a boom and bust instrument in a polity whose obligations, schools, ferries, fire seasons and the retrofit programme, are not. The Commonwealth’s rainy-day fund is named, with the humour Cascadians think of as dry, the Water Year Reserve.

Transport

The ferries

Commonwealth Ferries is the largest ferry system in the Realm and the Commonwealth’s most visible public service. It carries commuters, freight and most of the traffic of the island and peninsula communities, for which it is not an amenity but the road.

The guarantee is statutory rather than constitutional: the Commonwealth must maintain service to the communities named in the schedule to the Act. Because it is statutory, it can be amended, and amendment is proposed whenever the budget is tight, which is why the Ferry and Ports Report exists and why the ferry communities are the most reliably mobilised electorate in the Commonwealth.

The system’s real condition is worse than its politics suggests. The boats are old, the replacement programme has been late for two decades, crew shortages cancel sailings in the summer, and a cancelled sailing on a two-boat route is not an inconvenience but the closure of a road.

The passes

The Cascade passes carry the Commonwealth’s east-west traffic and close for weather, avalanche and wreck. When the main pass closes, the detour is several hours; when two close, the interior and the coast are effectively separate polities for a day or a week. The Commonwealth maintains avalanche control, snow sheds and a closure regime that ranks among the most sophisticated in the Realm, and the interior’s view is that a coastal government has never once understood what a closure costs.

Rail and barge

The coastal rail corridor runs the length of the Commonwealth from New Albion to California, carrying passengers between the cities and freight from the ports, and it is the busiest rail corridor in the Realm west of the plains. The interior’s rail carries wheat, fruit and containers. The barge route on the Columbia carries what the rail does not.

Urban transit

Both great cities built rail transit late, at great expense and against considerable local opposition, and both now carry more passengers than their promoters promised. Portland’s system is older and its network denser; Seattle’s is newer, deeper, and cost more per mile than any comparable work in the Realm because it was built through glacial till under a city that had already been built. The Commonwealth’s contribution to both is a standing interior grievance, and the answer that the cities’ taxes paid most of it has never convinced anybody who did not already believe it.

Air

Seattle’s airport is the Realm’s principal Pacific gateway after the Californian fields and the base of Orbit Airlines. Portland’s is the Commonwealth’s second and the interior’s is at Spokane, which also serves the northern panhandle of Idaho, a polity it does not belong to.

Demographics and society

The peoples

About 12 million people live in Cascadia, roughly two-thirds of them in the coastal cities. The Commonwealth grew faster than the Realm as a whole for most of the twentieth century and is still growing, by migration from other polities rather than by birth rate.

The treaty nations are treated above and are not a demographic category in this Commonwealth’s law, because their governments are governments.

Scandinavian and Finnish families came for the fishing and the timber, and their names are on half the boats and most of the coast’s headstones. Chinese, Japanese and Filipino communities in the port cities are older than the Commonwealth and survived expulsion, exclusion and internment to become part of the permanent character of Seattle, Tacoma and Portland. Vietnamese, Korean and Indian communities arrived in the later twentieth century, the last substantially with the software industry. Latino families, first in the orchards and vineyards of the interior and now throughout the Commonwealth, are the largest of the Commonwealth’s recent communities and a large share of the interior’s population. Slavic communities from the Russian Republic and its neighbours settled in the interior and in Portland’s eastern suburbs, and the interior’s Russian and Ukrainian congregations are among the few growing churches in a Commonwealth whose churches are mostly emptying.

The Black population is small for the Commonwealth’s size, and the reason is set out under The flood of 1948 and Black Cascadia.

Religion

Cascadia is the least churched polity of the Realm. Church attendance is the lowest recorded anywhere in the United Kingdom of America, the proportion of Cascadians professing no religion is the highest, and the Church of America is weaker here than in any other polity, holding a cathedral in each city and congregations that its own bishops describe as elderly.

The exception is the interior, where the churches are fuller, the congregations younger and the Commonwealth’s secular self-image is regarded as another coastal affectation. The difference is one more line along the same fault, and the Commonwealth’s arguments about assisted dying, drug policy and school curriculum run along it exactly.

What replaced churchgoing on the coast side is the outdoors, and Cascadians say so themselves without much irony: the mountain, the river, the trail and the run of fish are the things the maritime Commonwealth is reverent about, and its environmental politics has the cadence and the certainty of a confession.

Housing and homelessness

Housing is the Commonwealth’s domestic crisis and its own doing.

The cities of the Sound and the Willamette are among the most expensive in the Realm relative to wages. The growth boundaries, which protected the farmland and the forest, constrained supply; the Commonwealth did not build inside them at anything like the rate its own population growth required; and two of the Realm’s largest companies added tens of thousands of high-paying jobs to a market that had not built for them.

The result is visible in a way Cascadia finds hard to bear: encampments along the rivers and under the viaducts of the two cities that consider themselves the most decent in the Realm. The Commonwealth’s homelessness is not the worst in the Realm in absolute numbers and is among the most conspicuous, because it is concentrated in two cities whose self-image cannot accommodate it and whose winters do not kill the people sleeping out.

Both explanations are true and the article states them together. It is a supply failure the Commonwealth caused by choosing preservation without building, and it is a failure of self-image in a polity that legislates for salmon with more urgency than it legislates for tents.

The present First Steward’s housing programme is the first serious attempt to override local objection to building inside the boundaries. It is opposed by neighbourhood organisations in both cities, by the interior on the ground that the cities should be made to spill instead, and by a section of her own party.

Health

Health care is the federal guarantee of the National Health Service of America, delivered by the polity. Cascadia went beyond the guarantee earlier than most and in four places: mental health and addiction treatment as a guaranteed service before the Realm required it, dentistry, rural air ambulance and remote clinics for the coast, the islands and the interior’s distances, and assisted dying, which arrived by initiative against the advice of every party in the Commonwealth and which the Commonwealth’s own physicians were slowest to accept.

The delivery is good in the cities and thin where the distances are long, which is the coast and the interior, and the air ambulance exists because a Commonwealth with mountains, islands and a four-hour drive to a hospital cannot pretend otherwise.

Education

Schooling is a county and district matter under Commonwealth standards, and its funding is the argument: the property tax cap passed by initiative in the 1990s and the trust lands whose timber revenue makes up part of the difference, which is why the Commonwealth’s forest policy is also its school policy.

The Commonwealth has two great public universities, one on each side of the old territorial line, and renamed both for the Commonwealth in the decades after admission as a matter of deliberate policy: the University of Cascadia at Seattle and the Commonwealth University at Eugene. Their rivalry is the Commonwealth’s oldest civil argument, older than its party system, and is conducted principally through football, medicine and the competition for public research money, in descending order of ferocity.

Culture

Music. The guitar music that came out of the Commonwealth’s cities at the start of the 1990s is the thing the Realm dates itself by, and Cascadia’s own relationship with it is complicated: it was made in a rainy, cheap, unfashionable place by people who could afford to live there, and the conditions that produced it no longer exist in either city.

Coffee. The Elliott Coffee Company, founded at Seattle in the 1970s, turned a local habit into a Realm-wide one and is now in every high street in the United Kingdom of America. Cascadia’s relationship with it is the same as its relationship with everything it has exported: proprietary, faintly embarrassed, and convinced the local version is better.

The outdoors. Outdoor equipment is a Cascadian industry, and its characteristic form is the cooperative: member-owned, catalogue-and-shop, with a governance structure that people actually vote in. It fits a polity of customer-owned utilities and farm cooperatives, and it is the reason the Left and Solidarity Bloc takes Cascadia seriously.

Books. Cascadia reads. The Commonwealth has more independent bookshops and small presses per head than any polity in the Realm, a reading public out of proportion to its population, and the standard explanation offered by Cascadians is eight months of rain.

Glass and craft. The studio glass movement has its Realm-wide centre in the Sound cities, with a museum, a school and a trade that supports several hundred makers, and it is the one Cascadian art form that the rest of the Realm buys rather than merely admires.

Sport. The Commonwealth follows the gridiron code through its professional club at Seattle and its two universities, and follows it less feverishly than the South or the plains. Its distinctive sporting culture is participatory rather than spectating: running, climbing, paddling, cycling and skiing, in weather the rest of the Realm would stay indoors for.

Failings

The nations’ land and the nations’ fish. Treaties were made and broken by the same government. Land guaranteed in perpetuity was taken by statute; reservations were reduced twice and then allotted and sold; peoples were concentrated by removal on ground that was then cut out from under them. The fishery secured by treaty was regulated to nothing, and the right was enforced only when the nations sued and won in 1974, after which the Commonwealth’s own constabulary spent two years arresting people for exercising a right the Realm’s highest court had affirmed.

The dams. The Commonwealth’s prosperity was built on drowning the main stem of its own river. Celilo and the other great fishing places, in use for thousands of years, are under water. Villages, farms and cemeteries went with them, the compensation was small and calculated as though a fishery were an acreage, and the salmon runs of the interior and of Idaho were destroyed for power and freight that the people who lost them do not receive.

The expulsions and the exclusions. Chinese residents were driven out of Tacoma in 1885 and nearly out of Seattle, and nobody was meaningfully punished in either place. The founding territory excluded Black settlers by law until admission required its repeal in 1859, and what the law had established, covenants and practice continued for a century afterwards.

The internment. The Commonwealth objected, was ignored, and assisted: its constabulary escorted the removals, its clerks made the lists from its own registries, its boards leased out the farms. The return was met with sales that had complied with the form of the law and were upheld, and the apology waited until 1988.

Keelport. A city of forty thousand people, most of the Commonwealth’s Black population among them, was housed on a flood plain because it was the ground nobody wanted, assured in writing that the dykes were safe, and flooded in an afternoon. The inquiry cleared everyone and did not ask why the city was there.

The transition that was promised. The mill towns were told that the end of the old-growth harvest would be managed. It was not. The retraining money funded departure, the payments ran out early, and the Commonwealth’s own auditors said so.

Hanford. A farming community was given a month to leave in 1943, the ground was used to make the material for the Realm’s first weapon, the waste went into tanks built to last twenty years, the tanks leak toward the river, and the downwind families were not told what they were breathing until the studies arrived decades later.

And the present one. Two of the wealthiest cities in the Realm cannot house the people who work in them, and a Commonwealth that legislates fiercely for the salmon has not legislated with anything like that resolve for its own tenants.

Symbols

The flag is a green field crossed by a blue stripe for the Pacific and a white stripe for the snow, with the silhouette of a Douglas fir at its centre. It was adopted by the Legislature in 1911, from a design submitted by a schoolteacher at Olympia to a public competition, and it replaced an unofficial banner that had been flown at exhibitions and fairs since the 1870s.

The competition’s other finalists are recorded and are a fair index of what the Commonwealth thought of itself at the time: a leaping salmon, rejected as too particular to the coast side and too likely to annoy the interior; a sheaf of wheat over a fir, rejected for the opposite reason; and a design carrying the Crown’s arms in the canton, rejected on the argument, which carried the chamber, that the Commonwealth’s flag should show the country and not the government. The salmon’s rejection has aged worst, and a proposal to add it has been made to every Legislature since the 1974 judgment.

The Douglas fir is the Commonwealth’s tree, and the fir on the flag is drawn in the old-growth form, with the heavy lower limbs of a tree grown in the open, which very little of Cascadia’s remaining forest has.

The motto is Flumina nos iungunt, the rivers join us, adopted at admission and cut over the Legislature’s doors at Olympia. It has always had a second reading in the interior, where the rivers that join the Commonwealth are the interior’s rivers and the joining was not consensual, and interior members quote it back at the cities with a regularity that the cities have stopped noticing.

The great seal shows the fir, the mountain and the river, with the Crown above and the admission date of 1859 below, and is used on Commonwealth instruments and on the vehicles of its constabulary.

Assessment

Cascadia is the Realm’s most deliberate polity and its least finished argument.

Its constitution is the most experimental in the United Kingdom of America and most of the experiments have worked. The directly elected First Steward has produced neither the tyrant nor the paralysis that the rest of the Realm predicted in 1908; the recall removed a corrupt head of government in 1937 and has disciplined every one since without being used again; the initiative gave the Commonwealth a public coast, a deposit law and an environmental settlement that its own parties would never have passed; and a Lord Lieutenant refusing to choose between two mandates in 1985 produced a better rule than either side had asked for.

Its record on the things that were done to other people is the ordinary record of the Realm, which is to say bad, and this article states it rather than managing it. The nations’ fishery was enforced only after they sued. The expulsions went unpunished. The internment was assisted by a government that had objected to it in writing. A Black city was put on a flood plain and flooded. The mill towns were promised a transition and given a leaving allowance.

What is genuinely distinctive is the gap between the Commonwealth’s self-image and its arithmetic. No polity in the Realm thinks better of itself: stewardship in the title of its head of government, trust in its land law, treaty implementation as an annual public document, the cleanest power and the most protected farmland in the Realm. And the same polity holds the Realm’s worst contamination, hosts half its nuclear force, cannot house the people who work in its cities, and has been unable in seventy years to obtain a treaty about its own river because treaty-making is not a thing a polity may do.

The Commonwealth’s four regions agree on the rain and on very little else. The cities have the votes, the interior has the water and the power, the coast has the fish and the poverty, and the mountains decide when any of them can reach the others. Whether one Commonwealth was ever the right answer to that geography is a question Cascadians ask at every crisis and never quite put to a vote. The case for it is that the river could not have been governed by two polities, and the river has still not been governed well by one. The case against it is heard every winter, when the passes close and the Commonwealth is two places again, and it holds for as long as the snow does.

First Stewards

The Commonwealth’s head of government was chosen by the Legislature, with the title of Premier, from admission in 1859 until the constitutional reform of 1908. Since then the office has been the First Steward, elected directly. The table lists the holders since the reform.

Chronology

See also

• Daily Life in Cascadia
• Cedarvale
• State of Idaho
• New Albion
• Kingdom of Alaska
• Orbit Airlines
• Daily Life: Indigenous Nations
• The Royal American Parks System
• Elections and Constituencies
• United Kingdom of America

Trivia

Categories

Polities & the Federation · Commonwealths · The Pacific Northwest · Treaty Nations · Rivers & Water Law · Public Power