In two and a half months salmon farms throughout the B.C. coast are due to expire, with no firm commitment yet from the federal government to renew these licences.

But as uncertainty hangs over the controversial industry, the man speaking for Ahousaht’s Tyee is standing in support of aquaculture in his territory, with a claim that a failure from the government to support salmon farms in Ahousaht waters will betray commitments to reconciliation with First Nations.

On a crisp, spring morning children from Haahuupayak Elementary school danced on the site where, generations before, their ancestors were housed at the Alberni Indian Residential School.

A basketball court is nearly complete on the location where Peake Hall once stood, a structure built in 1954 to serve as a dormitory for the assimilationist institution, which took in First Nations children from across the West Coast and B.C.’s Interior. After being run for most of a century, the residential school closed in 1973, followed by the demolition of Peake Hall in 2009.

A woman found deceased on street near Victoria Quay in the early morning hours of April 2 has been identified as 30-year-old Nicola-Cree Belcourt. It appears she had been fatally injured due to an incident involving a vehicle that was not at the scene when police arrived.

According to the RCMP, on April 2, 2022, at approximately 2:30 a.m. police came to find an unresponsive woman near the intersection of Roger Street and Victoria Quay.

The provincial Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, Murray Rankin, arrived in Ahousaht April 13 to sign an historic agreement with Ahousaht Ha’wiih and elected council. The agreement, called AHP-CII-UK, is an MOU (memorandum of understanding) that took about 18 months of negotiations between the provincial and Ahousaht governments to craft.

With an emphasis on the path to “economic reconciliation,” April 13 marked 10 years since First Nations gained director status with the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District.

Leaders from the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ and the Huu-ay-aht First Nations spoke before a full board meeting on April 13, a decade since they became the first Indigenous communities in the province to gain representation on a regional district.

B.C. has to bridge deep divisions before it can put healthy ecosystems and biodiversity ahead of timber supply, says a co-author of the province’s Old Growth Strategic Review.

“This sector has been rife with conflict for a very long time and there’s a lot of scared people out there,” said Garry Merkel, a registered forester and member of Tahltan First Nation. “Everybody is afraid for different reasons. We see each other as enemies and it causes deeply rooted behaviour that stops us from coming together and solving this collectively.”

With COVID restrictions easing, Two Nuu-chah-nulth basketball teams were able to once again travel to Prince Rupert for the 2022 All-Native Basketball Tournament (ANBT).

Running from April 3 to 9 this year, the annual basketball tournament took a one-year hiatus in 2021 due to the pandemic, but this month the event was back in action again for the 62nd year.

Although the recently announced federal 2022 budget commits $11 billion over six years towards housing, health, social services and education for Indigenous people, Courtenay-Alberni MP Gord Johns says it still falls short of addressing some injustices facing First Nations.

The NDP caucus has entered into a Supply and Consent Agreement with the minority Liberal government. According to Johns, the agreement aims to bring stability to parliament and get Canadians the help they need “following a sustained period of chaos and disruption in national politics.”

The Tofino General Hospital (TGH) was built in 1954 to service a regional population of 400 people, according to the Tofino-Long Beach Chamber of Commerce.

Since then, the region’s population has grown to around 10,000, with visitation levels reaching an estimated 600,000 people per year in 2018, the chamber added.

In a letter addressed to Health Minister Adrian Dix on March 28, the chamber urgently stressed the need to replace the hospital to accommodate this growth.

Many Nuu-chah-nulth people are aware that through their health coverage provided by Pacific Blue Cross, they have access to free over-the-counter medications and supplies. There is a long list of OTC medications called Plan W on the First Nations Health Authority website stating what people on this plan have free access to.

Ideally, people under this plan can go to their pharmacist to ask for their OTC medications, and the pharmacist does the necessary prep work and hands the items to the client. But people are reporting that this has not been the case at some pharmacies.