rowing up on Vancouver
Island, British Columbia,
I found it easy to mock
visitors from abroad.
“This place,” they’d
whisper. “I can go
swimming in the
morning, skiing in the
afternoon, then kayak home for dinner.” The views,
the landscape, the wildlife—that was the refrain.
Even in the cities, the scenery dominates. On any clear
afternoon, look up from the streets of downtown
Vancouver and you’ll see the snow-capped North
Shore mountains glowing pink, an ostentatious show
of natural beauty so commonplace that most
residents barely take notice.
There were times when visitors’ compliments
sounded like admiration for a two-dimensional
backdrop. But BC is a complex place, especially
when it comes to its aboriginal communities.
With a population of just over 4.5 million, the
province is home to around 230,000 aboriginal
people from 203 diff erent First Nations, who speak
34 languages and 60 dialects. Today, these groups
live a life of ostensible equality, but centuries of
oppression—referred to in offi cial circles as 'alien
modes of governance'—began a cycle of social
devastation that hasn’t yet been fully resolved.
In many aboriginal communities, poverty,
homelessness, and substance abuse still loom large.
Indeed, residents of BC live in a province of uneasy
contrasts. My village on the island was a haven of
middle-class comfort, bordered by the poverty of
a First Nations reserve. As a child, I walked down the
stony beach and saw wealth and privilege give way
to sudden hardship. This, I was told once, was my
fi rst experience of apartheid.
As an adult, I spent more than 15 years living
outside Canada, and from time to time I would catch
a glimpse of the ancient cedars and airborne orcas
used to advertise my home province. I wondered
which B.C. the visitors were coming to see. Was it
possible to engage with the region’s complexities and
to approach its original residents in a way that went
beyond the superfi cial?
If I was asking that question of others, I realised,
I fi rst needed to answer it myself. So I planned a tripG
that took me from mid-Vancouver Island, the land of
Snuneymuxw and Snaw-Naw-As First Nations, north to
Port Hardy, then on to the remote, fog-shrouded islands of
Haida Gwaii, home of the formidable Haida people, to fi nd
out whether it was possible for a visitor to take in BC’s
nuanced human stories while still keeping those forests
and snow-capped peaks in view.
Port Hardy, a seaside town of 4,000 people on the
northern tip of Vancouver Island, is today known as a
destination for storm-watchers, sport fi shermen, and
hikers, though the place has retained a plaid-shirt solidity
that refl ects its past as a centre for logging and mining.
Outside the airport I met Mike Willie of Sea Wolf
Adventures. Willie is a member of the Musgamakw
Dzawada’enuxw First Nation, and he runs what he calls
boat-based cultural tours across the waters into
Kwakwaka’wakw territory. That includes the village of
Alert Bay, the Namgis Burial Ground, with its totem and
memorial poles, and the unpredictable waters nearby.
He goes from Indian Channel up to Ralph, Fern, Goat,
and Crease Islands, and as far north as the Musgamakw
Dzawada’enuxw territory, also known as the Great Bear
Rainforest—a 25,000-square-mile nature reserve that is
home to the elusive white 'spirit' bear.
I’d arranged to travel with Willie to the U’mista Cultural
Centre in Alert Bay, as well as to Village Island, the site of an
infamous potlatch—a feast and gifting ceremony through
which First Nations chiefs would assert their status and
territorial rights. (Potlatches were banned in 1884 by the
Canadian government, on the grounds that they were122124 travelandleisureindia.intravelandleisureindia.in