As you pull into the dock on Lasqueti Island, abalone-lined eyes stare down on you from on high.
The Salish eyes, as they are called, are dotted throughout a mural that features prominently on the side of a shed on the False Bay passenger ferry dock, the gateway into the community.
As you round the corner and walk up the ramp, details of the mural begin to emerge.
A pair of upstretched hands welcomes visitors. Canoes glide across a bay filled with wildlife. Smoke rises from a dense network of red cedar houses built along the shore.
The mural, painted by local artists Sophia Rosenberg and Julia Woldmo, is a depiction of what False Bay might have looked like 250 years ago.
Jesse Recalma, a Qualicum First Nation artist who carved and added the eyes on the mural, said his ancestors’ lands stretched from the Comox Valley to Craig Bay and across the water to include Lasqueti, Texada and Jedidiah islands in the Strait of Georgia.
Today, Lasqueti Island, off the east coast of Vancouver Island near Qualicum Beach and Parksville, is home to about 500 people, most of whom live on properties that are at least 10 acres.
But recent research shows the island once hosted a thriving community that, by some estimates, was four times bigger.
Archeologists from Simon Fraser University have uncovered evidence that 800 to 2,200 people once lived on Lasqueti, which shows signs of human occupation for seven millennia.
SFU emerita professor Dana Lepofsky, who co-led the five-year research project, said there is “hard, factual evidence” showing Indigenous people have been on the island for more than 300 generations.
The team’s findings are further corroborated by the fact that many B.C. coastal First Nations use the same name for Lasqueti Island — Xwe’etay, pronounced hwey-eh-tie, which means yew tree in several Salish languages, she said.
In Coast Salish tradition, the island was created when supernatural rodents gnawed through the roots of a yew tree growing high up in the sky. As it fell, First Peoples sang to the tree, willing it not to break. The tree would become Xwe’etay — Lasqueti, the home of many deer.
The Indigenous population of the island plummeted after the arrival of European diseases in the 1780s. Project findings show the final smallpox epidemic of 1862 wiped out the resident population. “That was the final blow,” Lepofsky said.
Homesteaders, mainly of European descent, began arriving around a decade later in the 1870s. The first settlers are believed to have brought along the now-iconic herds of sheep that run wild across much of Lasqueti.
Lepofsky said the thousands of sheep served as evidence to authorities in Victoria that they were there to “improve” the land.
Former Lasqueti Island trustee Peter Johnston, who has been living on Lasqueti since 1974, said the prevailing belief when he arrived on the island to work as a schoolteacher was that it was used only in passing by First Nations peoples during the summer before it was settled by Europeans.
“There weren’t many of them here and there weren’t many signs of them here. So we convinced ourselves that we didn’t move into somebody else’s territory, that this was just a place that they had come and used,” he said. “We were wrong.”
Island in the middle of everywhere
Lepofsky said the difficulty of travelling to Lasqueti today — there is only a small passenger ferry with irregular service — can make it feel like an “island in the middle of nowhere.”
Some locals like it that way — one asked the Times Colonist not to mention the name of the island in this article, for fear of drawing a fresh wave of visitors.
The off-grid community, which often has more sheep than humans, draws a crowd that enjoys living off the land.
Lasqueti’s boom-bust cycles of logging and fishing — the last logging occurred in the 1950s — means there’s not much of a resource economy.
For a time in the 1970s, land was cheap — waterfront land cost about $1,000 per acre, while inland acres went for roughly $300 each.
“It was really easy to live here for very little money, because there wasn’t much to spend money on,” said Johnstone, who quit his job at the school a few years after arriving and was able to mostly make a living by building fences with beachcombed wood.
While property prices have since skyrocketed, Lasquetians continue to live simply, making good use of a free store where items people no longer need can go to a second or third home.
Johnston said he was taught to self-brew beer by a fellow Lasquetian to cut costs and avoid making extra trips to Vancouver Island.
Centurion VII, the 60-passenger ferry that provides critical service between French Creek and False Bay, doesn’t make daily runs even on peak schedules, and winter storms regularly cancel several sailings in a row.
Johnston recalls one of his guests going stir-crazy when he realized there was no easy way off Lasqueti on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the off-season. “It just drove him nuts. He spent the whole next day trying to get off the island and left as soon as he found a way.”
But for seafaring First Nations along the B.C. coast, Lasqueti was a hub due to its central location in the Strait of Georgia, said Lepofsky, who has been living on Lasqueti since the 1990s.
Artifacts found on the island show that goods travelled to Lasqueti from Squamish to the north, Oregon and Idaho to the south, with other trade connections stretching east into the Fraser River.
Oqwilowgwa Kim Recalma-Clutesi said her people reshaped the landscape to feed their communities, transplanting crab-apple trees and planting eelgrass near where their villages used to be on Lasqueti.
“It’s all around. You can see the stinging nettle planted in rows,” said Recalma-Clutesi, a former elected chief of Qualicum First Nation. “It’s still living. It’s still in plain sight.”
Elder Betty Wilson from Tla’amin Nation on the Sunshine Coast said she knew of elders from Klahoose Nation on Cortes Island who would make the journey to Lasqueti to gather food.
“Our fish traps go along the coastline, fish trap after fish trap after fish trap,” Wilson said.
In collaboration with the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum in Ottawa, SFU researchers have put together an exhibit — currently on display in Ottawa and at Simon Fraser University — named The Island in the Middle of Everywhere.
The exhibit shows off the innovative food practices of North Coast Salish peoples and how they were able to secure a rich supply of fish, clams and plants.
The museum’s travelling exhibitions and loans manager, Alison Ward, said when the exhibition at SFU comes down on July 4, there are plans to bring it along the coast to Powell River and Qualicum Beach, as well as other museums on Vancouver Island.
There’s even talk of taking it as far away as Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Ward said.
The travelling exhibit was displayed on Lasqueti first, at the island’s community hall, accompanied by an Island-wide potluck that saw lots of locally grown and harvested foods — including lamb stew — served to residents and visitors.
Representatives from the Tla’amin Nation were among the about 160 people who attended the mural unveiling and exhibition opening event on May 3.
One Lasqueti resident, while driving this reporter to the hall, remarked that the gravel roads were so busy that day, it was as if a wedding or a funeral was taking place.
Fear of archeologists
Not everyone has been interested in learning more about what life was like on Lasqueti before the settlers arrived — especially if their land has been deemed an archeological site.
Lepofsky, who has been talking about the subject on Lasqueti for more than 20 years, says it’s “a mixed bag” when it comes to homeowners letting researchers poke around their properties and take ground core samples.
About half of Lasqueti landowners with known archeological sites on their land declined to participate in the research project, she said.
Disturbing archeological sites is illegal under B.C.’s Heritage Conservation Act, with a maximum punishment of up to two years in jail and potentially hefty fines, up to $50,000 for an individual and $1 million for a corporation.
Developers and property owners across the province have had their projects halted after the discovery of burials or other archeological sites, sometimes after millions of dollars in sunk costs.
Owen Wilson, who surveyed Lasqueti homeowners about their knowledge of the Heritage Conservation Act as part of his graduate thesis at SFU, said only a quarter of the 30 people he spoke to had a good idea of what responsibilities landowners have under the act and its possible consequences.
Wilson found that landowners wanted notice of recorded archeological sites on their land titles so they could make an informed purchase of the land — which doesn’t always happen — and for the government to pay for any further archeological investigations, he said.
It’s similar to homeowners’ attitudes about ecological conservation efforts on private property, he said, but conservation efforts often have an element of community policing that archeological protection doesn’t have.
“If someone clearcuts their land, that’s not something that their neighbours are just going to let slide,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily happen for archeology.”
Johnston recalls that when Lepofsky first set up an “ask an archeologist” booth at the island’s fall fair, no one would approach her out of fear that their lands might be taken away.
“We didn’t all believe it, but it was a story that if you were found to have artifacts on your property, [the land] could be taken away,” he said.
But eventually, someone took her up on the offer and asked for an assessment for an artifact that they had found on their property while gardening.
And when other residents saw that no land was taken away, they began getting more comfortable with sharing the bits and pieces of history that they’ve found on their properties, Johnston said.
In turn, Lepofsky, an internationally recognized archeologist and ethnobiologist, helped her fellow Lasquetians understand how to look at the land and see history hiding in plain sight.
Before he knew what to look for, Johnston said, he thought Indigenous clam gardens were the work of “an eccentric Englishman” who built rock walls in intertidal pools out of sheer boredom.
Rediscovering Lasqueti’s Indigenous history has helped add a layer of richness to life on the island, he said.
The project has also given some First Nations peoples a chance to reconnect with their land. The Xwe’etay/Lasqueti Archaeology Project partnered with K’ómoks, We Wai Kum, Halalt, Tla’amin and Qualicum nations to conduct their work.
(More than a dozen nations have connections to Lasqueti. Snaw-Naw-As First Nation has held a woodland licence to two Crown parcels on the island since 2023, but so far has not indicated it will conduct any logging operations on those lands.)
In 2022, members from the Qualicum, Katzie and Snuneymuxw First Nations conducted a cultural burning ceremony on Lasqueti, the first held on the island in more than 200 years. The ceremony drew attendance from a number of nations across Salish Sea.
’You want people to come face to face’
Recalma-Clutesi, of Qualicum, said it was the first time to her knowledge that non-Indigenous people were invited to witness a burning ceremony.
The project isn’t just about resurrecting the past, she said.
Lasquetians, keen to learn more, have set up a reconciliation committee to raise awareness and understanding among islanders about Indigenous peoples.
Lepofsky said some Lasquetians had never met a First Nations person before the archeology project.
“The first event, everyone sat separately and they didn’t know how to talk to each other,” she said.
But on the day of the mural unveiling, people mingled freely and there were plenty of hugs to go around, she said.
“You want people to come face to face,” Lepofsky said. “We need to collectively decide what it’s going to look like to honour and protect Indigenous heritage.”
On the day of the unveiling, Betty Wilson, the Tla’amin elder, said she hardly spent a single moment not chatting with someone.
Lasquetians gave visitors locally grown garlic, as well as mugs and T-shirts commemorating the conclusion of the project.
Wilson apologized for having to leave early for the boat ride back to Tla’amin territories, but promised friends that she would be back soon.
