The City of Port Alberni has been granted more than $440,000 in joint provincial and federal funding for a multi-faceted approach to improving the health and safety of unsheltered people experiencing homelessness in the area.

The funding will allow vulnerable people in Port Alberni to have greater access to local services which will help tackle homelessness as the community recovers from the impacts of the pandemic, said Josie Osborne, MLA for Mid-Island Pacific Rim and minister of municipal affairs, in a press release.

New owners have stepped up to ensure MV Frances Barkley continues operation.

Business partners Greg Willmon and Barrie Rogers, who own Devon Transport along with a group of rental and leasing companies, announced Monday, Aug. 16 that Lady Rose Marine Services has accepted their offer to purchase the business. They gave assurances the passenger and freight service, a fixture of west coast life for generations, would continue uninterrupted.

Memphis Dick’s fall plans changed in a hurry.

And now the 19-year-old Tseshaht First Nation member will soon be continuing both her academic and athletic careers south of the border.

In August Dick signed a letter of intent to attend Northwest Indian College, located in Bellingham, a city in the state of Washington.

Though she is not quite sure which program she’ll enroll in yet, Dick was offered a partial athletic scholarship to the school where she will play for the women’s basketball team.

Jobs and fibre supply are key factors in a memorandum of understanding between Tseshaht First Nation and San Group, but the new agreement extends beyond business, promising collaboration on a cultural level as well.

“There are so many ways for us to work together,” said Wahmeesh, Ken Watts, Tseshaht chief councillor after the MOU was signed in late June.

“Today is the beginning of our formal relationship,” said Kamal Sanghera, San’s CEO. “We have been working with Tseshaht for a number of years and look forward to a number of important projects.”

The people of Houpsitas, the home of Ka:'yu:'k't'h'/Che:k'tles7et'h', can sleep well now that a new tsunami warning system has been installed.

According to Elizabeth Jack, the First Nation’s emergency coordinator, Kyuquot did not have a proper tsunami warning system until October 2020. Residents of the low-lying ocean-front community relied on a donated fire siren that was attached to the KCFN administration office.

“But it was pointed outward toward Walter’s Island so people behind it or even next door to it couldn’t hear it,” Jack told Ha-Shilth-Sa.

A wildfire near Poett Nook is now considered low risk after a Western Forest Products fire watch crew responded by applying 1,200 gallons of water to the blaze yesterday, according to a release by Huu-ay-aht First Nation. 

The 10-square metre ground fire occurred on treaty settlement lands that are under a standing timber purchase agreement with Western Forest Products, near Bamfield. 

The site of the fire is still under observation. 

The wave of discoveries this summer of unmarked graves at residential schools sparked a distant memory in Bernard Jack. He recalls attending Christie Indian Residential School on Meares Island as a young child, where a gravesite could be seen outside of a church that students were taken to for services.

“All I seen was pegs at the end of a grave,” said Jack, who attended Christie from 1968-73.

Hasaatuk’s musical interest was stirred awake while attending Haahuupayak Elementary School in Port Alberni. 

Through Nuu-chah-nulth immersion classes, she learned how to sing her ancestral songs and became inspired to write music of her own. 

“It gave me a voice,” she said.

After seeking guitar lessons from her father, who is from Ahousaht First Nation, Hasaatuk wrote her first song when she was only eight years old. “ƛaqaʔas,” meaning “standing around outside,” was about the commercialization of Christmas, she said.

The most people in two years gathered at the traditional home of the Mowachaht in early August with the return of the First Nation’s Yuquot Spirit Summerfest.

A range of long-term and short-term campers, as well as seasonal workers from Tofino and Ucluelet, have been finding refuge down the Kennedy Lake logging road system for years. 

Some evenings, the line-up of vehicles along the West Main Forest Service Road runs several kilometres long, as observed by the Ha-Shilth-Sa.

“Disheartened” by the amount of pollution being left behind and the disregard of the province-wide campfire ban, Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation member Timmy Masso said he could no longer sit idly by.