Mamalilaculla

Friday, June 7, 2024

The most glorious—and WARM!– weather of our entire trip so far was ours to enjoy on this day—and we certainly did! We woke at around 8 am to a morning exploding with sunshine, and enjoyed it on Braesail; we didn’t try to rise in time to have the free coffee on the dock that was provided by the fantastic owners of the Lagoon Cove Marina, and Walt simply made his own. We took showers and spent a leisurely morning filling Braesail’s two 100-gallon water tanks and visiting with our neighbors on the dock, providing two of them with a tour of our boat—it takes a LONG time for some 200 gallons of water to flow through a small-diameter hose!

We said farewell to lovely Lagoon Cove and its excellent owners at about 12:30, and were able to sail gently in Knight Inlet for about half an hour before the wind decreased to the point that switching on the engine was necessary. Walt had contacted the Mamalilaculla Band office in mid-morning to obtain permission (it was granted) to visit Village Island, a place about which we’d read (I recommend Hughina Harold’s Totem Poles and Tea, her account of her time as a nurse and school teacher on the Island around 1930) and that we’d been wanting to visit since our first trip through the Broughton Islands in 2017.

We arrived in a bay near the Band’s dock and offices, dropped our anchor, and motored in Coracle, our dinghy, to the dock, where we tied up and climbed out. We could find no one anywhere around the building or on shore, so we waked along a wide, grassy path edged with tall thimble berry bushes interspersed with wild roses, and took a “self-guided” tour of the once-thriving village of Mi’mkwamlis, now in ruins.

Apart from the constant humming of myriad bees in the berry blossoms and roses and the calls of some birds, there was no sound as we walked past collapsed houses and the crumbling school building where Hughina taught and where the two missionary ladies, with whom she lived, held worship services, a small white-shell beach, and the remains of a First Nations “Big House,”

with collections of miscellaneous tools and household goods assembled here and there along our way, observing the results of the government’s attempts to erase the Indigenous population and the ongoing successes of the forest in reclaiming its territories. It was a very sobering experience, seeing the desolation left after the disappearance of the community that had lived for millennia in such an exquisite setting!

We rowed Coracle back to Braesail in the late afternoon and made our way through sapphire waters sprinkled with islands

to placid Mound Bay Cove, a very large harbor occupied by only two other sailboats. Here we spent a tranquil, windless evening under cloudless skies; I wasn’t able to do any star-gazing later that night, however, despite the new moon and the absence of ambient light, because it doesn’t get dark enough at this latitude and time of year to see any but the brightest stars until about 1 am, and I didn’t want to stay up that long! Good night, stars, and may the souls of all the dead, especially those of the Mamalilaculla of Village Island, rest in God’s peace.