Hesquiaht elder Lucas kept language alive
The terrain was rocky dangerous, but it was a route to a pebble beach near Hot Springs Cove that Kayla Lucas had taken as a child that led her to her grandfather.
Although search-and-rescue crews and the coast guard had conducted an extensive search, it was Kayla who found the remains of her granddad, 80-year-old Hesquiaht elder Harry Lucas, near the shores of the inlet on Saturday.
Lucas had gone missing 36 hours before. He had been travelling in his boat from between Ahousaht, an island northwest of Tofino, to the cove to visit family on New Year's Eve.
She sat on the beach and let the rain fall on her face. “It was hard, it was horrible — but I was relieved that he was home,” said Kayla
“The ocean didn't keep him and we were able to get that closure,” she added.
Kayla said the that water had always been a home to her grandfather. Her earliest memories of Lucas were at potlatches: “He danced his way onto the floor with his long grey hair and his hat.”
Her grandfather was entertaining and charismatic, and “could take a crowd that was tired and done for the day and spark more life into them. He loved to make people laugh.”
She loved to hear her grandfather and other family elders speak among themselves in their Hesquiaht dialect: “That was when they were at their purest form — to see them talk in their language and teach in their language even though we didn't understand, it just felt right.”
Kayla said her grandfather kept the language alive, even after surviving residential school: “He would talk to himself in our language and he would answer himself, and he would be seen doing that in public.”
Lucas was a fluent speaker of the Hesquiaht dialect, and could also write the Nuu-chah-nulth language.
He was a critical resource in his work as a translator for the Nuuchah-nulth Tribal Council and during the B.C. treaty process in the 1990s.
The council said it was a tragic loss, and the community is grieving deeply.
Later Lucas was part of First Voices, a project started 15 years ago by the First People's Cultural Council and the First People's Cultural Foundation to empower Indigenous Nations to document their own languages and keep the documentation within their own communities, and he also mentored students at North Island university.
Lorna Williams, University of Victoria professor emerita Indigenous knowledge and languages, and chairwoman of the foundation, said the loss is profound.
“Our languages up until our lifetime were not written or recorded. Whenever a language speaker passes on, there is a whole world that is no longer available to us,” she said.
Kayla said Lucas leaves behind a large extended family.
“He was an amazing father figure to his nieces and nephews and grandchildren, and made it a point to show that they were loved and taken care of by him,” she said.
Lucas, who lived with his wife in Port Alberni, was also a carver, singer and drummer, and fisherman.