User blog:Cridone/Cascadia-First Nations

The Cascadia-First Nations is a very interesting concept. It may not be wholly original, as I first thought when I played Tacoma for the first time, but just the fact that the creators of Tacoma took these two ideas and morphed them together flawlessly is what's amazing to me. So, here's a breakdown of the Cascadia-First Nations.

Cascadia
First, we have Cascadia. Cascadia is a concept and movemant of a bioregion that would exist on the west coast of North America, the boundaries of which are defined by the Cascadian bioregion, consisting of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, Yukon, and it's also been proposed that it should contain Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. It's also possible that it'd contain a sliver of Northern California that contains the Cascade Range.

First Nations
Then we have the First Nations. As Wikipedia puts it, "the First Nations are the predominant indigenous peoples in Canada south of the Arctic Circle, with those in the Arctic area being distinct and known as Inuit."

Thus, Cascadia-First Nations
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Thus, we have the Cascadia-First Nations; a realization of the Cascadia concept that also recognizes and respects the First Nations. This can be seen in not only their name, but their flag as well. Taking the horizontal triband of blue, white, green from the Cascadian flag and the maple leaf from the First Nations Canadian flag.

Flag of the Cascadia-First Nations
What I love about this flag is not only that it combines these two ideas, recognizing the First Nations, I also find it a much better design of the Cascadian flag.

Currently, the Cascadian flag - known as the Doug - is the triband that I mentioned earlier of blue, white, green with the splotchy, titular Douglas fir tree slapped on top of it. As people have pointed out, the Douglas fir tree is hard to see sometimes even up close, and looks rather unappealing and bland.

The First Nations design of the maple leaf not only recognizes where Cascadia comes from and of course the First Nations, but honestly, it just looks neat! The stylized maple leaf with First Nations patterns and symbols on it makes a very welcome, beautiful replacement of that ugly Douglas fir tree that adorned the flag before. (I am sure that someone could make a good version of the Cascadian flag with the Douglas fir tree, but I haven't seen one so far.)

Now, I want to make it clear that I am ignorant of the Cascadia cause and only have a surface level understanding of it. I am in no way saying that this is what Cascadia should be in real life, I've only written this blog post out simply because I love this game and it's worldbuilding and want to express my love, and because I think that the interpretation and realization of Cascadia seen in Tacoma is really cool and interesting, with a well designed flag attached to it.