Our home & sacred land
On B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, I find a vibrant storytelling culture and learn from the stewards of the land
On a crisp spring morning, our seaplane climbs above the Sechelt Inlet, a fiord that nearly cleaves the Sechelt Peninsula from British Columbia’s mainland. Once we’re in the air, Candace Campo’s words in she shashishalhem, the language of the shíshálh Nation, reach my ears. This is my introduction to the Sunshine Coast.
Without direct road access to the rest of B.C., the Sunshine Coast, which stretches 180 kilometres between Howe Sound and Desolation Sound, is only accessible by ferry, private boat or float plane. Travelling on or over water is a part of life in this region, the traditional territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, shíshálh, Tla’amin, Klahoose and Homalco Nations.
I am listening to Campo, who is a member of the self-governing shíshálh, born and raised in the community of ch’atlich, give a pre-recorded audio tour on my headphones. Campo, who runs Talaysay Tours, is also seated right behind me, having joined our small group of journalists on this flight. Over my shoulder, I see her smiling, looking down on the rocky shoreline as we travel up the Sechelt Inlet (also known as ?alhtulich).
On her recording, a collaboration with Sunshine Coast Air, Campo retells the shíshálh creation story. It follows their Creator as they travel the same inlets, villages and waterfalls of the Salish Sea we are now flying above, to bestow the gifts the shíshálh would need to thrive on these lands, including the instructions to cure and smoke fish and carve cedar canoes.
Her voice is soothing, like an auntie telling stories at her kitchen table while you sip tea together. Although I am 4,000 kilometres away from my community, as an Indigenous person I find that the warmth in her voice feels like home.
From the sky, we look down on the places where Campo says her family would spend hours collecting clams. She tells us how her grandparents prepared sea cucumbers for her as a kid by cooking them for 24 hours, and how her people have always lived off, and in relationship with, the sea, mountains and forest they call home.
“We do have a goal,” Campo tells us about her tours later, over lunch at Sechelt’s Batch 44 Brewery and Kitchen. “We want people to be in relationship with the land (and) community. The only way we could do that is to share our stories and history.”
On the Sunshine Coast, there are many opportunities to learn from the stewards of the land and participate in cultural traditions in a way that changes your relationship to place — a gift that travellers can carry home.
After lunch, our next stop brings us to Sechelt’s Red Cedar Woman studio, where Coast Salish weaver and fibre artist Jessica Silvey and her family teach weaving as the ancient method of combining elements to create a new connected whole. We’re here for a hands-on lesson, making a small woven cedar mat we each get to take home.
“We’re going to lay out seven and weave six,” says Silvey’s daughter Ali, pulling seven strips of téxém-ay (red cedar) from warm water and laying the strips in front of her. “You can put one
hand at the bottom here. You want them nice and close together,” she adds, walking around the large table and leaning over shoulders as she talks.
As I weave, I notice how I have to slow down, feeling the strength in the soft inner bark and the genius of the ancestors who engineered these weaving methods, used for everything from clothing to fishing nets. I feel myself entering into a relationship with téxémay as I learn the cedar’s tendencies, my body interacting with the land, culture, art and science of the shíshálh Nation.
Their community has a sustainable practice for harvesting cedar, making a horizontal cut into the tree trunk only when the sap is running in the spring. This method is thousands of years old and allows the tree to repair itself. I’m told the same tree is never harvested twice, a practice meant to maintain the cedar for future generations.
“Somebody may have been thinking about making a canoe for four generations before it’s actually time to take that tree down,” Campo tells us the next morning, during her Talking Trees tour through Porpoise Bay Park.
About a 30-minute drive from Madeira Park’s Painted Boat Resort Spa & Marina, where we’re staying, we meet to walk through the forest, while Campo and her co-guide, Richard Till, speak to us about the plants, trees, animals and history of this place.
Touching a tree trunk, Campo explains that cedar holds a sacred place in the life of shíshálh and other West Coast Nations. “We understand how the cedar tree came into our lives because there’s a story,” she says.
She retells a Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) story of a chief and matriarch who lived a long life full of kindness and generosity so that when they passed to the spirit world, the Creator transformed the chief into téxém-ay (red cedar) and the matriarch into tíxw-ay (yellow cedar). That’s why the red and yellow cedar continue to give to their people today, Campo explains.
But cedar is also embedded in the painful histories of the coast, as we learn later that day, at Sechelt’s tems swiya museum. We admire a glass case of cedar creations, among them a suitcase. Campo shares that when her grandmother arrived at a residential school, the nuns took away the cedar suitcase she brought her belongings in — a suitcase her mother had made — so her family would never see it again.
Later that day, we visit a stop on the Purple Banner Tour, an initiative where studios and galleries along the Sunshine Coast hang a purple banner as an invitation to drop in. Year round, Homalco artist Derek Georgeson and his partner, Shy Watters, invite visitors to their Aupe Studio in Sechelt (though they ask that people call ahead).
“Yellow cedar is a soft wood. It’s like butter when you carve it,” says Georgeson, leaning on the large carving he is working on of a bear catching a salmon.
Across his workshop, I see Watters standing among her cedar hats, both traditional and contemporary. They include cedar graduation caps, hats adorned with cedar flowers and traditional designs with wool woven throughout, with messages such as “Salish Queen” and “Land Back.”
Afterwards, I joke to Campo that it feels like we spent the whole trip meeting her cousins — that’s because most of the people we meet are related to her. (When the museum assistant at tems swiya, Campo’s cousin, was unwell and unable to give us a tour, Campo jumped in, unlocking the museum and touring us in her stead.) Before colonial contact, Campo explains, there were over 20,000 shíshálh living in this region. Now, there are only about 1,700.
The shíshálh have always been impeccable hosts, Campo says. In their massive longhouses, as big as soccer fields, they would greet guests from as far as California and elsewhere, who would often stay with them all winter as they engaged in storytelling, politics and cultural exchange, Campo explains.
As we head to catch our ferry back to Vancouver, I wonder to myself what tourism would be like if all travel was grounded in the history, geography, traditional stories and languages of the people who have cared for the land since time immemorial.
I’ll hope for that day.