How Indigenous-led Tourism Can Revive Lost Languages On Vancouver Island
Content warning: residential schools, abuse
“As our people say, when the tide is low, the table is set.”
I’m carefully picking my way over perfectly placed clam shells that mingle with broken glass, the sharp edges of which have now been softened by a lifetime of shifting tides. Janet Wilson, my Xwémalhkwu—or Homalco First Nation—guide for the day, leads me past this misfit marine feast and up a crescent beach to the now uninhabited village of Aupe: the place where her mother was stolen from her family and taken to a residential school, a place overflowing with trauma, yet a place that somehow still holds some semblance of hope for the future.
Wilson shows me a black and white photo from the 1940s, the image starting to blur and fade, unlike the memories of the suffering that took place here. It’s a picture of the village before it was abandoned in the early 1980s and the place where generations of Xwémalhkwu before her once lived from spring to fall, before relocating to an area close to nearby Campbell River to escape the icy, biting wind that accompanied winter.
The nomadic, traditional way that the Homalco people lived, however, was forever changed by the colonial introduction of residential schools, reserves and the Indian Act. Wilson’s mother was just five years old when she was taken, and six years old when she contracted tuberculosis at the school due to unfit living conditions that left her bedridden for most of her adolescent life.
“I didn’t grow up speaking the language because my mother lost her language,” says Wilson. This was just one of the many abuses that her mother and other stolen children suffered. She credits the land, however, for eventually healing her mother. Now the oldest Elder on the Homalco First Nation reserve, she has turned her suffering into a career as a drug and alcohol counsellor. “She’s a strong, powerful woman,” Wilson says, “and now [our tours] allow us to continue the legacy of getting out on the land in order to move forward and heal. Tourism is revitalizing our language and culture.”
The boat driver for the tour, Ron Hackett, attended a Catholic day school in Aupe that was built in the 1960s. And while he was able to live at home in the village, the treatment at this school was no different to that at residential schools.
Wilson’s cousins also attended the day school. “It was horrifying and degrading,” Wilson says of their experiences there, which she doesn’t lay out in detail, only telling me that “they don’t want to come back and see the building.”
It was also hard for Hackett to return to the site where the school still stands, almost obscured now by the encroaching greenery, the lush nature a stark contrast to the barren building. He tells me, however, that he has since moved on: “That was yesterday. Tomorrow is a better day, and we are going to make a lot of positive changes around here.”
Those positive changes include plans to tear down the school and build a treatment center in its place. To create a place where people struggling with addiction can come to reconnect with nature, to rediscover themselves and to heal in the place where their ancestors once thrived.
“There’s a lot of history here,” he says, “but we can change it.”
That change is beginning to make itself known. As I pace the trails in the abandoned village that Hackett has painstakingly built and maintained, I learn about the various medicinal qualities of the plants that grow here from Wilson: spongy moss utilized for bedding, diapers and pads, licorice fern root to cure a sore throat and the dye inside the Red Elder tree used for lipstick, regalia and weaving. I get a glimpse of the life that once flourished here, and will continue to, despite the lingering legacy of the colonial practices that led to the desertion of the land.
The Homalco people are returning to the land, to the sea that surrounds it, to the cedars that stretch towards the sky, concealing the now dilapidated buildings.
“We believe in the positive energy of the cedar,” says Wilson, as we walk down a trail scented with fresh earth and the tang of sea salt. She tells me that her people would hang the boughs outside their doors to keep that energy close.
The Homalco people are not just returning—they are reclaiming this place. The People Water Land Tour is the best way to experience the revitalization of the Nation firsthand, as just one of the sustainable options Homalco Tours offers on their traditional land.
The tour, which weaves in sightings of killer whales breaching the dark, saline waves of the famed Discovery Passage with flocks of eagles nesting in nearby islands, is complemented by the work the company is doing to ensure the sustainability of marine and land wildlife on and around Vancouver Island. In fact, the Homalco First Nation has a salmon hatchery in Orford Bay, which was responsible for releasing over 400,000 fish into the ocean last year during the September/October salmon run. This is just part of the conservation work that booking a tour supports, along with bear conservation, Indigenous youth cultural revitalization and marine mammal protection.
Later, I’ll watch two orcas frolic on the brackish horizon as the boat heads back to Campbell River, but for our last moments at Aupe, Wilson pulls out her drum and begins to sing. It’s a song of sorrow, dedicated to the many Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Women who, like the lost children of the residential school system, may never come home. Her voice entwines with the trees, birds, memories of what the village used to be, and what it will become.
It’s a place that feels deeply sad, peaceful and hopeful all at once. As Hackett tells me when we head back down to the cove, “It’s still home.”
When you go:
- The tour is available from May to October and is suitable for children ages 8 and up
- Prices start at $239 for youth ages 8 to 15 and $272 for adults ages 16 and up
- Half-day tours (five hours) are available in the morning and afternoon
- Book online at https://homalcotours.com/
- Book an overnight stay at Naturally Pacific Resort to explore more of Campbell River
Immediate crisis support is available to residential school survivors. Call the 24-Hour National Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419