Recent data from the BC Coroners Service is bringing encouraging signs for those fighting the ongoing overdose crisis, with the first half of this year showing the lowest fatalities since the early days of the pandemic.
But amid a complex social problem fueled by an increasingly toxic supply of street drugs, those tasked with finding solutions are still stressing the enormity of the public health emergency that has been in place since April 2016.
Tseshaht First Nation member Shalaya Valenzuela is an Olympic medalist.
Valenzuela is a member of the Canadian women’s rugby sevens squad. The Canadian club captured a silver medal on Tuesday, July 30 at the Paris Olympics, which are ongoing in France.
Canada was downed 19-12 by New Zealand in the gold-medal match.
The silver-medal performance is the best ever Olympic finish for the Canadian women’s team.
Canada had previously won the bronze medal at the 2016 Rio de Janiero Olympics in Brazil.
Provincial officials and health representatives are praising a new Indigenous-led mental health and addictions treatment centre that will be operational by this fall on Quadra Island.
The development seeks to mitigate an overdose crisis that has escalated to claim an average of seven lives a day in British Columbia. Indigenous people are six times more likely to die from drug poisoning than the rest of B.C.’s population, according to a recent report from the Office of the Provincial Health Officer.
On July 18, 2024 at an event held at the Government House in Victoria, Cloy-e-iis, Judith Sayers, Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council president, was one of 60 British Columbians to receive the King Charles III Coronation Medal.
The medal was presented by the Honourable Janet Austin, Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. Sayers receives this medal for her contributions and commitment to helping her community, uplifting those in needs and improving the lives of others.
This summer a totem pole is coming to life, commemorating the blood ties that began hundreds of years ago when a Māori canoe was blown across the Pacific to Vancouver Island’s shore.
Hundreds of years after this chance encounter in Ehattesaht territory, Māori visitors came to Vancouver Island this June, a group that included at least one descendent of the three men who spent three years with a Nuu-chah-nulth tribe long ago. After his relatives went back home to New Zealand, Alan Heta stayed behind to make a totem pole with Hesquiaht carver Tim Paul in Port Alberni.
After a long five-year break due to COVID 19 and then staffing issues, the 38th Tlu-piich Games are back this year.
Led by Tlu-piich Coordinator Neve Watts, the games are set to take place in Port Alberni with the opening ceremonies on Aug. 10th, followed by events running through to Aug. 13.
“It will be very mellow,” Watts told Ha-Shilth-Sa, “not as it was in previous years.”
The Doobah Creek watershed, an area ravaged by industrial logging, can now begin its healing journey with $852,000 in federal funds to support restoration work over the next four years.
Located on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Ditidaht First Nation’s territory, about 92 kilometres southwest of Port Alberni via the Bamfield Road, the entire headwaters of the Doobah Creek were logged off multiple times — a poor industrial approach which annihilated fish spawning habitat. Forty years later, the Ditidaht people are starting to rebuild.
A music festival took over Pachena Bay this weekend, echoing a rhythm through the tall trees as throngs of bohemian-clad visitors rocked and swayed on the forest floor below into the early hours.
Momentum is building to have the Whalers’ Washing House returned to its original site at Yuquot, after the contents of the shrine have sat in a New York museum’s storage for over a century.
Substantial resources are coming from the province to support the land and resource management of modern treaty First Nations.
The new fiscal relationship between B.C. and modern treaty nations involves a co-developed funding model of about $1 million per First Nation per year for three years, which enables capacity treaty implementation work, according to the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation.