A glowing fuchsia sun bleeds pink into the smoothed cotton clouds on an early July morning at Fort Rodd Hill. If you haven’t been to the historic lighthouse site before, you could be certain this is not like any regular morning. Before the sun glimpsed the horizon, dozens of canoe families from First Nations all over Vancouver Island began packing up their tents spread out across the manicured field after a two-day stopover on the annual intertribal canoe journey. Xwepsum Nation hosted the stopover at the historic site, partially supported by funds from the South Island Reciprocity Trust, before setting off to Sci’anew down the coast. After a long night of cultural protocols, the smell of burning cedar is still in the air when Reciprocity Trusts volunteers walk down to the water to help with clean-up and witness the launch.

Canoeing has been an essential part of Indigenous cultures, economies and governance systems in the Pacific Northwest and across Turtle Island for millennia. Canoes and canoe journeys are so central to many Indigenous practices of cultural exchange, that they are a common metaphor used in treaty-making and guiding relationships traveling a shared path with mutual respect and self-determination. However, the canoe was not respected by colonial powers for hundreds of years, as an international relations framework or as an essential means of transportation and cultural exchange. Many Nations are still healing from this legacy of forced dislocation from one of their essential technologies.

The contemporary intertribal canoe journeys have been carried forward by canoe families from dozens of Coastal Nations throughout the Salish Sea since 1989, when Emmett Oliver of the Quinault Nation helped organize the Paddle to Seattle, with nearly 20 tribes coming together to reopen this shared ancestral highway on the sea. From that point forward, the Canoe Journey became an annual event, pushing forward cultural resurgence and the reclamation of traditional canoe travel and craftsmanship. Each year, a different First Nation hosts the canoers, with each canoe family beginning in their home territory and paddling to the final landing on the host Nation’s shores, with other Nations hosting stopovers along the way.

The annual intertribal canoe journey is an integral celebration and revitalization of coastal Indigenous cultures and technologies that lifts up Indigenous people of all ages. Funds from the South Island Trust were allocated to  the canoe journey in 2025.  What an honour to witness the journeys and all of the beautiful knowledge that awakens with the resurgence of the practices that generated it.