Mothership Meanderings: Broughton Archipelago - Part 1

October-November 2000

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Alan Wilson

Our mothership isn't equipped for ocean crossings, just coastal cruising, so I can't offer personal tales of tropical mothershipping. But here's a getaway for your imagination, at least, and perhaps a destination for next summer?

The Broughton Archipelago is a paradise of islands and islets-hundreds of them-lying between the windy waters of Queen Charlotte Strait and the great mainland inlets of British Columbia.

Tom Sewid at Mamalilaculla

Here First Nations culture thrived for over 10,000 years. When you paddle the area, you feel those years, centuries, millennia. Your paddle dips the same waters as paddlers before you, you experience the same currents, winds, and beaches.

Three years in a row we've travelled north to this area in August, enchanted by it. Two years ago we anchored in a secret little nook in the Indian Group islands and spent a wonderful time paddling and taking the highlight photos of our trip. This year we returned and visited First Nations sites in the vicinity.

British Columbia's First Nations peoples are in a process of renaissance as they arise from over a century of desperate conditions. There is work on the treaty front, there are efforts to preserve language and culture, and there are economic initiatives being undertaken to make the transition away from traditional resource extraction industries.

In the Village Channel area we saw two faces of this First Nations resurgence. At Mamalilaculla (Meem Quam Leese) on Village Island we met Tom Sewid, a dynamic young man who entertains visitors with stories of his people while standing in front of the massive house poles of an ancient 'big house'. Across the water on Harbledown Island near Dead Point is the site of New Vancouver (Tsatsasnokami), where Chief Bill Glendale is making an effort to re-establish the community and build a new big house.

The two sites were occupied until the 1960s when the government closed the schools, leaving the people little choice but to move to centralized, serviced communities at Alert Bay, Campbell River, and elsewhere. Around the coast, villages fell silent and evidence of the past began to be swallowed by the forest.

Both Tom and Bill have been trying to reclaim that past. Tom Sewid's work over the past few years has capitalized on the tremendous attraction of Mamililaculla, the village of the "last potlatch" in 1922 when the Canadian government clamped down on these great ceremonies-"our parliament" as Tom says. He regales his audience from around the world with the story of how the federal law tested but did not break the spirit of his people, how the culture went underground, emerging again in the 50s and 60s with the work of great artists and leaders.