Exploring the deeper significance of B.C.'s beaches and mountains beyond beauty and recreation

Beaches and Mountains is an audio series exclusive to CBC Listen's On Demand streaming platform hosted by scientist Johanna Wagstaffe and storyteller Rohit Joseph.

It explores the many connections between our favourite natural spaces to be in, why they matter to us as humans, and how we have to fight to preserve our beaches and mountains in the face of climate change. 

"Like an act of prayer."

That's how artist Eliot White-Hill, whose Coast Salish name is Kwulasultun, describes the Snuneymuxw people's traditional approach to a swim in the Salish Sea where it kisses the shores of Newcastle Island, just off the eastern coast of Vancouver island.

The island is known as Saysutshun in the Hul'q'umi'num language of the Snuneymuxw and means "training for running," referring to special places where runners, paddlers and warriors would bathe and pray before a race or battle.

"You go to the water and you ask it to help cleanse you ... not just your body, but your spirit and your mind and your psyche," said Kwulasultun, speaking from the very island where his ancestors did just that for thousands of years.

Like so many of the beautiful beaches, mountains and other natural wonders that make up what colonizers have called British Columbia, Saysutshun has now become a recreational destination for thousands of settlers and tourists. But as Indigenous people explain, there's a much deeper significance to these places where many choose to play.

"When people come here, traditionally, you come with intent," said Kwulasultun. 

The three-square kilometre island has been significant to the Snuneymuxw since time immemorial. It's presently a marine provincial park accessible by ferry from Nanaimo, B.C. 

Not only was it once where Kwulasultun's warrior ancestors trained and prayed, it's also where people came to grieve, where elders shared knowledge with children and where canoers could ask for the Creator's protection before hitting the marine highway known today as the Salish Sea.

"When people were about to do serious work they'd come here and prepare themselves and ask for help with that," said Kwulasultun.

"I think there's a lot of that energy here still."

Musician James McGuire says he, too, feels the energy of his ancestors at his home in Skidegate on Haida Gwaii, around 750 kilometres to the northwest.

"I live on the same beach that my people have lived on for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years," said McGuire, who also goes by his Haida name of SGaan Kwahagang.

Accessible only by sea or air, the isolated northern archipelago of Haida Gwaii is home to fewer than 5,000 residents but welcomed over 32,000 visitors between March 2019 and February 2020.

Not only are those visitors exploring beaches and forests where warriors walked, they are also "walking in the footsteps of the supernaturals," McGuire says.

Haida stories say it was Kalga Jaad, a supernatural ice woman, who guided the Haida people out of harm's way as the ice overtook their territory and then, when safe, guided them back home.

According to scientists, 21,000 years ago the area was completely covered in ice, which began receding about 16,000 years ago and took centuries to fully melt. 

"Kalga Jaad was the one that guided us southwards and protected us from the ice age so she was around at least 14,000 to 10,000 years ago, and so [were] we. So there was some cross-over between us conversing with supernaturals and now to the world that we are today," said McGuire.

Legends of a great flood that could also be connected to the ice melt underpin the W̱SÁNEĆ people's reverence for ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱, also known as Mount Newton, which is now a popular provincial park for hikers on southern Vancouver Island.

The legend says the First Nations of the Saanich Peninsula survived a great flood thousands of years ago by lashing their canoes to an arbutus tree on the mountain's peak using cedar rope and riding the rising water levels.

The Indigenous name for Mount Newton means "place of refuge" in the SENĆOŦEN language.

"This mountain is one of our most special places," said MENEŦIYE Elliot, a SENĆOŦEN teacher from the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation.

"We don't have temples and we don't have churches — we have our mountains and our beaches and our rivers."

It's those places of natural beauty that many people come to B.C. to see: places that were once covered or created by the ice age and maybe a little magic; places that, as McGuire says, visitors may get even more out of if they learn more about them.

"The understanding of the nature that you so crave — when you understand it from the perspective of the people that have lived there for thousands of years, you're going to have a greater appreciation for it," McGuire said.