In 1999, Christopher Grabowski, a documentary writer and photographer, read an article in the Globe and Mail, reporting that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans withheld a major study of economically devastated West Coast fishing communities and then released a sanitized version, omitting the criticism contained in the original report. He packed his notebook and camera and set out for the west coast of Canada, north of Vancouver, a vast, rugged mosaic of islands, peninsulas and waterways at the edge of the continent. There he travelled from place to place usually by water, because no roads can be built there and talked to people in towns and villages whose world had changed profoundly, almost overnight. That trip turned out to be the first of many over the next ten years.

The west coast of Canada, which extends 965 kilometres northwest of Victoria by air (about 27,000 kilometres of coastline), once supported scores of resource towns and other single-industry communities. Fish, forests and minerals were rich, abundant and conveniently located near myriad waterways for easy shipping to destinations near and far. These resources have been extracted in huge quantities for some two hundred years, faster and faster as each decade has brought new technology and new demand for the products.

Along the west coast, as in other Canadian hinterlands, most of this bounty has been obtained in resource-dependent towns: small, remote settlements built around mines, mills, fisheries, railways, smelters, etc., to accommodate the workers who extract and process the resources. Workers and their families moved long distances to settle in these small, isolated towns, which had access to the outside world only by steamship (and, by the 1950s, small aircraft), because the wages were good. But resource towns are precarious by nature: the raw materials can simply run out, and world markets (most products are exported) are unpredictable.

The best way to get to Ocean Falls, a very small community 480 kilometres north of Vancouver and accessible only by air or sea, is to travel to the northern tip of Vancouver Island and then proceed north by ferry, following inlets and channels of unsurpassable beauty. The ferry stops at isolated communities to unload cargo and to let a few passengers disembark. After about a day and a half of sailing, it arrives at Ocean Falls—or what’s left of it—in the middle of the night.

Ocean Falls, known as one of the the rainiest inhabited places in Canada, was occupied by the Heiltsuk people for thousands of years. In 1906 a group of American and British businessmen

In 1972, Crown Zellerbach Canada Ltd., which now owned the paper mill and the town, decided not to upgrade the mill at Ocean Falls despite record sales exceeding $200 million. The company had begun to develop a more modern plant at Elk Falls, near Campbell River on Vancouver Island, and the provincial Social Credit government agreed to transfer the timber rights from the Ocean Falls operation to the new mill.

Crown Zellerbach began shutting down the mill and Ocean Falls in 1973. That was an election year, and the new ndp government bought Ocean Falls for $1 million and restarted the mill.

A view of the rugged local waterways from Ocean Falls. According to a writer at traveloceanfalls.com, "There has been a million pictures taken of the area and not one of them does it justice. It's impossible to really know how beautiful it is until you've seen it with your own eyes. If you've been here and seen it, it's in your memory forever and you know what I mean. If not, well . . . that's a shame.

Cormorant Island, a few miles off the northeast corner of Vancouver Island, and Alert Bay, the snug harbour inset into its coastline, were named for British warships in 1846 and 1858. The bay had been a seasonal gathering place for the ’Namgis (Nimpkish), a Kwakwaka’wakw nation, and by 1890 had became a permanent settlement for them with a residential school, salmon cannery and church, and in the early twentieth century a sawmill and hospital. The town of Alert Bay that emerged consisted of a “White End” and a “Village” made up of two Indian Reserves. The island is now home to a diverse population of about fifteen thousand people, divided fairly evenly between the Village of Alert Bay, the ’Namgis First Nation and Whe-la-la-u Area Council.

During the period of first contact, European trading methods were congenial to traditional Aboriginal practices; but as the Europeans developed resource-extraction industries, Aboriginal culture was displaced by the economic culture of company towns and other single-resource towns (based on commercial fishing, logging, mining, etc.), and the Aboriginal workers formed the bulk of the labour force. The gold rush of the 1850s brought thousands of new immigrants into the hinterland, and the diseases of Europe took an enormous toll among Aboriginal people.

In December 1921, Chief Dan Cranmer organized a potlatch at Village Island near Alert Bay and invited about three hundred guests. The occasion was Cranmer’s marriage, and the ceremony would also mark the transfer of certain rights. On the first day, Cranmer received gifts from his wife’s family, all of which, along with his own fortune, he gave away in the course of the celebration. Police charged forty-nine people with violating the potlatch law, and twenty-six people were imprisoned in the penitentiary in New Westminster. Ceremonial items were seized; some were sent to North American and European museums.

The ban on the potlatch was never repealed; instead it evaporated in 1951 when a new Indian Act was drafted by the federal government. Aboriginal Canadians were given the right to vote in 1960. Most of the residential schools in Canada were closed in the late 1960s and early ’70s. St. Michael’s School at Alert Bay was acquired by the ’Namgis First Nation in 1975 and eventually renamed ’Namgis House. For three generations, Aboriginal communites in Canada suffered the accumulating effects of cultural suppression and are today emerging from the resulting nexus of poverty, substance abuse, mental illness and poor education. Languages and traditions are being recovered; populations are regenerating.

After living in Vancouver for some thirty years, Flora Rufus moved back to the village of Alert Bay, where she was born. When the Vancouver Sun writer Stephen Hume asked her what was permanent in this community, she responded: "Me. I plan to die here." When her picture was taken at the edge of the old burial grounds at Alert Bay, she put on her mother's bright red ceremonial dress and stood motionless in contemplation, gazing toward the setting sun.

Beginning in 1979, some of the Kwakwaka’wakw property confiscated at Dan Cranmer’s potlatch in 1921 was returned to the community. Some of the items can be seen at the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay.

Christopher Grabowski’s photography and stories have appeared in many publications and art galleries in North and South American and in Europe. He is a recipient of the Michener-Deacon Fellowship and a frequent contributor to Geist. “Land’s End” is part of the Geist Memory Project and is made possible by assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development.

Former Geist web editor Josh Wallaert sat down for coffee with documentary photographer Christopher Grabowski to talk about Land’s End you can read the interview here.

The Fraser River rises in the Rocky Mountains in eastern British Columbia, then runs 1,400 kilometres in a giant S shape: north, then south, and finally west from the town of Hope to the delta known as the Lower Mainland. The flood plain along this stretch of the river is known as the Fraser Valley.

A few years ago we moved to a farm on the side of this valley, about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver. The farm’s hand-hewn timbers, stone fence and mountain view with no human beings in sight, all made us curious about the past—first about the farm itself, and then about the forest that surrounds it and the people who had walked these mountain paths before us.

“My River of Disappointment” is what the fur trader Simon Fraser called the river in 1808; later it was given his name by his friend, the explorer David Thompson. Fraser didn’t do much naming. He was travelling with Natives and they told him what the places were called. The people of the valley called the river Sto:lo, and their lives were so shaped by it that they called themselves by the same name. The salmon runs were like nothing else in the world. On shore there were elk and deer, roots, berries and greens in the early spring. In a single day, the current could propel a canoe the same distance it would take a week to walk. This land and climate are so generous the people who lived here could spend most of the winter in ritual and celebration.

Stó:lo villages stood on opposing banks at the last easy place to cross the water. After that, the river split; each arm made its own way to the sea, and the boggy land in between was prime for birds and great for cranberries. The village on the south was called Qayqayt (pronounced “Kee Kite”). The one on the north was named for a great warrior turned to stone whose spirit lived on inside the rock that stood beside the water. Trees sixty metres high pressed in on the stone, and the forest rose steeply.

These trees were the first to fall in the clear-cut that became Vancouver. Stump City, it was called. Gold had been found during the previous spring, thousands of prospectors had flocked to the mouth of the river and already a miner could buy boots, booze and a shovel in the wooden shanties and tents between the massive cedar roots. The colonel charged with clearing the townsite wrote to the governor and reported incessant rain, half-thawed snow in the woods, thickets so close and thorny they made trousers into rags, thorns as big and strong as sharks’ teeth. The colonel mourned the loss of what he called “most glorious trees,” and he had a park set aside in a glen adjoining a ravine.

The Europeans in the new capital were enthralled with Queen Victoria, then in the middle of her seventy-year reign.

On a sunny November day in 2008, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, his cabinet and the television camera crews walked into the Big House at Fort Langley, where B.C. had been proclaimed a colony exactly 150 years earlier. These days Fort Langley is a tourist attraction, rebuilt in remembrance of how European settlement began, staffed by men in top hats and women in long dresses who know the price of a blanket in beaver pelts. Only one original building, a storehouse, remains. Its thick timbers are whitewashed inside and out, and tanned hides hang from the ceiling. This is the oldest building in B.C., they used to say, until it was pointed out that all over the valley archaeologists have unearthed pit houses built thousands of years ago.

The fort sits here, in Kwantlen territory, because this was the farthest upriver that ocean-going ships could sail. In 1828, the Hudson’s Bay Company put twenty-five men ashore in dense forest armed with trade goods: blankets, metal tools, rope. Within a year, they had married Stó:lo women and enmeshed themselves in the network of wealthy families who managed the territory. A Kwantlen chief took ownership of the fort just as Stó:lö families always took ownership of resources like a good berry patch or a rock that was well situated for fishing. He charged a toll when other tribes came to trade. His daughter married Chief Trader James Yale.

This valley, which cuts north from the Fraser River into the Coast Mountains, has two names, neither of them the ancient one that nobody knows any more. The Kwantlen call it Skyuks: the place where everyone died. It was smallpox that took them: the disease passed from settlers to Natives in distant parts of the continent, then travelled along trade routes and arrived in the valley thirty years before the first white man; and it killed two out of every three people. Skyuks was hit hard. The valley was abandoned, its name was forgotten and its neighbours knew it only by the tragedy that had claimed its people.

Stave is what the Hudson’s Bay men called the forest across the river from their fort. They went there to take the white pine, then floated the logs back, cut them into strips, and turned trees into staves and staves into barrels. They filled the barrels with salmon bought from the Kwantlen, then salted and sealed and shipped them to the Sandwich Islands. The fort shipped so much salmon that soon the stand of white pine, rare so close to the sea, stood no more. Stave was the name the settlers used for the valley they logged, the river they put sawmills along, the waterfall that plunged down to join the Fraser and the dam built in 1911,

Five generations of kids passed their childhoods in the mission school atop a bluff in the middle of the valley. Instead of waking to mothers’ voices, they woke in dormitories and listened to orders from Oblate fathers who silenced them when they spoke the language of their parents. The Oblates practised a hard-working, love-the-poor Christianity with a sense of theatre—a flair for drama in ritual— shared by the Coast Salish. For about fifty years, many nations travelled to retreats at St. Mary’s, where the high point of the year was the Easter re-enactment of the last days of Jesus. In 1894, the same year the town formed the Mission City Fruit Growers & Canning Association, a thousand dugout canoes converged below the bluff, filling the river from shore to shore.

Only the stone foundations of the mission remain today. The bluff has been turned into a park with tidy lawns and a complicated past. At the information centre an aerial photograph shows the old school, the barns, the fields, the tennis court and the new school built in the 1960s when the old one was closed—used mostly as dormitories for Native kids from rural reserves who were attending the high school in town. In Mission, the city that grew up around the corner, lacy suburbs stretch into the foothills. The downtown core is rough around the edges, especially on a Friday night in the blocks around the bank machines.

The men who have fished around Nicomen Island all their lives can recall how, as kids, they could reach into the river and pull out handfuls of eulachon (pronounced “hooligan”) as the fish fought the current to get back to their spawning grounds in nearby gravel bars. These skinny flashes of silver were so saturated with oil they could be lit like candles when dried. They began running in the Fraser River in April and peaked in May. Nicomen Island is sandwiched between the Fraser River and the first wild stretch of backwater sloughs east of Vancouver. This area, where the slow waters lie snug against the mountainside, is a favourite haunt of waterfowl and destination for spawning salmon that brings bald eagles by the hundreds. With the slough on one side and the Fraser on the other, Nicomen Island is visited regularly by men from the city with fishing poles and hip waders; “sporties” the Leq’á :mé l fishermen call them. Peace between the two groups is a sometimes uneasy affair. Today, the Fraser River eulachon runs are nothing like they used to be, so low as to be labelled “depressed” by the government workers who regulate fishing. The salmon are depressed too, and the Native fishermen, sitting in their powerboats, keep close watch on their nets to prevent the circling seals from grabbing the fish before they can.

The area around Nicomen Island is where Halq’eméylem was born; the language spread to become the tongue spoken up in the mountains, down in the delta and across the strait in Nanaimo, Chemainus and Cowichan.

In the summer of 1858, when the men in the survey crew that was dividing Canada from the United States got to the lake called Semá :th, they learned just how bad the mosquitoes could be. They camped in the tall grass meadow along the shore. Deer were everywhere, and the men went out for an hour at dusk and bagged forty ducks. Until June it seemed like a second Eden, but then the mosquitoes hatched and the place became a living hell. “We ate them, drank them, breathed them,” wrote one surveyor. At night they got no rest. The only escape lay in the middle of the lake, because mosquitoes prefer land, so the surveyor sought the hospitality of the people he called “wily savages,” those Stó:lo families who, during mosquito season, lived on scaffoldings built over the shallow waters left behind when the glaciers receded. They moored their cedar canoes to the scaffolds and climbed up ladders of twisted bark to platforms where they fished, visited, ate and slept in mosquito-free comfort. “A North American Venice,” as the historian Keith Carlson says.

Thousands of gold seekers hurried upriver. Sternwheelers billowed smoke as they struggled against the current. Canoes went by—lots of canoes, some manned by Stó:lo guides. Every day more men arrived bent on digging up every gravel bar they could, with no thought to where the salmon would spawn. They even dug the land out from under Stó:lo homes. Stories were told of Stó:lo women raped, of children shot at for target practice. B.C. Governor James Douglas came to keep the peace, pointed north toward a mountain peak, swept his arm to the west and declared that land reserved for the people of the river.

Today, a gas station stands where miners once bought supplies from the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Hope. Nearby a car dealership operates on the spot where a cluster of longhouses once stood. The salmon-spawning grounds that lie upstream made this large village a popular place to camp. Traffic on the river was heaviest in the summer months, when Coast Salish families from as far away as Vancouver Island navigated cedar canoes to the steep-walled canyon, where the water was rich with fish and the hot winds could air-dry even the thickest sockeye within a week.