It was a beautiful sunny afternoon as crowds gathered at Maaqtusiis School Gym to celebrate Ahousaht’s latest set of grade twelve graduates.

The graduates, all wearing woven cedar bark graduation caps, were introduced as they were escorted into the gym to the cheers of proud friends and family on Thursday, June 22.

Principal Ali Herron congratulated Maaqtusiis High School’s Class of 2023. She recited a poem called Don’t Quit, by Edgar A. Guest, reminding them that sometimes life gets tough, things go wrong, but it’s important to keep moving forward, and never give up.

Despite a warm spring and transportation difficulties with the prolonged closure of Highway 4, the sockeye season has so far gone smoothly for the First Nations that subsist off the Somass River.

Despite more than two weeks with only a detour route available for traffic coming to the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Alberni Valley Salvation Army is doing just fine providing meals to those in need.

The local Salvation Army branch operates the Bread of Life soup kitchen and provides food hampers through their food bank.

Although supplies are well-stocked now, Lisa George, director of community resources with the Salvation Army, said there was a degree of worry during the first few days of the Highway 4 closure.

It’s light, buoyant, versatile, inexpensive to make and is used in dozens of products in the seafood harvesting industry. But expanded polystyrene, often called by a brand name, Styrofoam. is toxic and a leading cause of plastic pollution in the marine environment.

For that reason, Rachel Blaney, NDP MP for North Island-Powell River, has introduced a private members’ motion, M-80, to ban foam from aquatic environments. She noted in her letter that there are several petitions urging the government to take action on foam in Canada’s waters. 

It has been a long time coming for students and community members along Vancouver Island’s west coast to see Ucluelet Secondary School renovations come to completion with a facility that is now seismically safe.

With an overcast sky, and the smell of west coast air, a crowd mustered outside the newly constructed USS building in anticipation for their grand opening on National Indigenous Peoples Day.

National Indigenous Peoples’ festivities resumed in Port Alberni after an interruption caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic and people showed up in droves at both the Port Alberni Friendship Center and for a day of fun hosted by the people of Tseshaht at their park next to the c̓uumaʕas (Somass) River.

On June 21 the Port Alberni Friendship Center opened their doors to the public at 11 a.m., offering up music, face painting, cotton candy and a free lunch featuring sockeye salmon.

An airplane crash in the Tahsis Inlet has claimed the lives of two aboard, according to early reports from the scene.

Emergency crews were alerted to the incident at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, June 20 near the Village of Tahsis on northwest Vancouver Island. RCMP reported that the crash occurred near Mizona Point in the inlet that leads to the small village. Four were aboard the small plane, which was headed from Masset on the northern coast of Haida Gwaii, to Tofino.

It’s a short walk from Ahousaht’s Maaqtusiis Elementary to the high school a little way down a hill, but it’s a giant leap for 21 Grade 7 students finishing up the year and looking forward to secondary studies.

The school gym was packed on Monday June 19 with proud family members cheering on the class as they made their way into the gym on the arms of their escorts. They entered one-by-one in procession as their names were announced to the cheering crowd.

The Nuchatlaht are heading into the summer celebrating a court ruling on their Aboriginal title over northern Nootka Island, while knowing that work lies ahead to satisfy a requirement to prove where exactly their territory lies.

The decision came from the B.C. Supreme Court earlier this spring, on May 11, as Justice Elliot Myers found that the small First Nation satisfies the legal test to be granted title over their territory on Nootka Island.

After years of travel delays from the Kennedy Hill project, Tofino businesses had just gotten accustomed to an uninterrupted highway passage to their west coast town this spring, when the Cameron Bluffs wildfire hindered tourism to the destination.