The only way in: A float plane arriving at Knight Inlet Lodge in British Columbia, home base for grizzly bear watching and other ecotourism adventures run by tribes of the local First Nations. Photo / Jason Drake / Knight Inlet Lodge
In British Columbia’s Knight Inlet, First Nations guides share stories of culture, history and their fight to protect the Canadian wilderness.
“We’re just going to cruise around this headland,” says Effie, our skipper and guide for the trip up the inlet. “There’s a kind of initiation experience, if you’re up for it. A rite of purification before you head into the wilderness.”
We’re in Knight Inlet, a large fiord in the Great Bear Rainforest, 240km north of Vancouver, and no, she’s not going to strip us all naked and set us ashore to make friends with a grizzly bear. Although she definitely could do that if she wanted. There are lots of them about.
Effie tells us there are moose in the glacial valleys far away at the head of the inlet. Young hunters had to go through a cleansing ritual in their canoes under an enormous waterfall before paddling for days to find their prey. All we’re going to do is drift through the spray. Hats on, parkas zipped, around the corner we go and whoa, the waterfall is roaring away. We get very wet.
“Aah,” says Effie. “Sorry about that. It’s been raining and that was a lot more water than I expected.” Nobody minds at all.
It may not be long, Effie says, before there are excursions to see those moose. She’s Dutch and did her guide training in New Zealand, starting as a 17-year-old. But her friend Stanley, another guide at Knight Inlet Lodge where we’re staying, is a member of the local First Nation. He and his whānau have moose-watching plans.
On another day, Stanley takes us by boat past his village, a handful of houses spread around a beach on a tiny island, with fishing boats roped up to the jetties. We don’t land because they’re renovating the little community hall where, ordinarily, we would go for a lesson in local history and culture.
He tells us about his mother, whose parents, when she was a child in the 1970s, were given a “choice”. Send your kids away to the missionary school on the mainland, where they will have to give up their language and all their other cultural practices, or you can keep them close and fend for yourself. It’s not like that now, but First Nations languages are still critically endangered.
It’s only been a few years since hunting grizzlies was outlawed, and it was money, not morality, that won the day. The First Nations and others persuaded the British Columbian provincial government there’s more to be made from watching bears than killing them.
So now it’s all on: ecotourism. Knight Inlet is in the traditional territory of the Daʼnaxdaʼxw/Awaetlala First Nation, a group belonging to the Southern Kwakwakaʼwakw people. It was established over 20 years ago by entrepreneurial conservationists Dean and Kathy Wyatt, and since 2017 has been owned by a group of five First Nations known as the Nanwakolas Council.
Those nations are stewards of large parts of central eastern Vancouver Island and the adjacent waterways and mainland areas, including Knight Inlet.
For them, tourism and conservation are the twin foundations for the renewal of their world and their people. Visitor fees help to protect the grizzly-bear habitat, rebuild salmon stocks, rejuvenate the culture and provide a venue for academic research. Some of the guides take a leading role in that research, and Stanley is one of several guides from the tribes. The lodge is richly decorated.
It’s such a similar story to iwi ventures in Aotearoa and they know it. Effie wasn’t the only guide who’d worked in New Zealand and I was told many times that the ecotourism of tangata whenua here is an inspiration.
They do have competition. Cruise ships come through, sometimes turning up later in Vancouver with a dead whale draped over their bulbous bow. And logging is still the main industry, although the way the lumberjacks go about their work is strikingly different to forestry practices in New Zealand. Old-growth trees are harvested in relatively small, curved patches, called cuts, and regeneration starts quickly. Wherever you look, even peering down from the floatplanes that fly you in and out again, almost everything is green. You can see the edges of those cuts, but it’s radically different from the barren hillsides we have to endure in New Zealand.
This is a landscape of glacial fiords, not unlike Fiordland, complete with the same large sea life: orca and other whales, sea lions and seals, dolphins. But it’s not the same, because on land they have wolves, cougars, bald eagles, moose. And those magnificent bears. The invitation from the First Nations is for us to come and see it, soak it up, waterfalls and all, learn the history and let the wilderness into our souls.
There’s a welcome note from William Glendale, chief of the Da’naxda’xw Awaetlala. “We’ve got a lot to show you and we hope you fall in love with our part of the world as much as we cherish it.”
Each evening before dinner in this magic land we sit out on the deck, the still water of the cove stretching away to the sheer mountains beyond. Sometimes, a whale surfaces. There’s a woodfire, although it’s simulated, running on gas.
Glendale says the bears are known as “Gela” and are revered for their spirit and strength, “which transcend into the supernatural world”.
Supernatural? There’s one looming over us as we sit there, rampant, absolutely huge, carved from wood. Effie says it’s modelled on a real one that used to be in all the movies. She insists it was almost as big.
CANADA
GETTING THERE
Fly direct from Auckland to Vancouver with Air New Zealand.
DETAILS
Where to stay: Knight Inlet Lodge. | grizzlytours.com
What to do: Destination British Columbia | HelloBC.com
New Zealand Herald Travel visited courtesy of Knight Inlet Lodge, Destination British Columbia and Air New Zealand.