A PROPER INTRODUCTION TO THE SUNSHINE COAST
Learning about the land via high-tech museum experiences and high-flying float plane tours.
Buckled in the passenger’s seat, I can see one of Josh Ramsay’s Converse shoes waving in the air as he leans across the windshield. He’s outside, spraying the glass with Pledge. “For polishing furniture—and planes!” he says with a grin. Ramsay is the owner of Sunshine Coast Air, and he’s splayed across the tiny float plane we’re taking up the Sechelt Inlet. The base is just a four-minute drive north from the tems swiya Museum, which was our first stop on the coast. Actually, let’s rewind a bit. This Shíshálh (Sechelt) Nation museum was the perfect introduction to the land—and, after all, isn’t it right to start at the beginning?
Among the timeworn items on display at tems swiya, there’s an exhibit that’s jarringly futuristic: a digital facial reconstruction of four Shíshálh people. From behind a screen, the figures breathe, blink and move. Museum curator Raquel Joe tells us they’re her Shíshálh ancestors
who lived around 4,000 years ago, discovered in a burial ground that’s twice as old. Called ‘kw’enusitsht tems stutula, which means Face to Face with Our
Ancestors, the exhibit shows a chief, his daughter and his twin sons.
“Like CSI, right?” remarks Joe as she tells us how scientists and designers created the piece, which was first revealed in 2021. They estimated that the chief was five-footseven, making him the tallest known person on the coast at that time. But even more mind-boggling is what he was buried with: 350,000 handmade stone and shell beads. “Nothing like that has ever been found in Canada, the U.S. or South America,” says Joe.
The living recreation of this family is drastically different from your average museum experience—it’s a striking reminder of a history that colonizers tried to wipe away. Joe says she can feel the family’s spirits and hear them talking. “If your chest gets heavy, that’s the ancestors,” she says.
Back to the plane. Ramsay is now safely next to me in the pilot’s seat as we take off across the water, and through noise-cancelling headphones I’m listening to Candace Campo of Talaysay Tours. The Vancouver tourism company partnered with Sunshine Coast Air to launch this audio and aerial tour in the fall of 2022. Like Joe, Campo is a member of the Shíshálh Nation. As we fly north, Campo tells us about Shíshálh customs and culture (for example, hosting a winter potlatch meant your guests lived with you all season, which resulted in the average person speaking three to five languages). She also tells us that, today, there are 1,700 Shíshálh people living on the Sunshine Coast. Before colonial contact, there were over 20,000.
Tours of tems swiya are available yearround, as is the Talaysay x Sunshine Coast Air flight. To travel mindfully in 2022 is to know whose land you’re on—and, thanks to Indigenous elders and educators, you don’t have to look hard to find the answer here on the Sunshine Coast.