I ask.
“You didn’t hear? One of our big buildings by the wharf burned down the other day. The supermarket, the post office, the liquor store—all gone.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No, it happened in the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep. Three girls set fire to the place. They said it was an accident. The cops are investigating.”
I remember the building from my past visit. The afflicted structure also housed a café run by a local nonprofit, which I had visited.
“There was a coffee shop in that building,” I say.
“Yeah, the Koeye Café,” she says, frowning. “Gone as well. Including their offices and library. The whole town’s upside down. Everyone’s on edge. They’ve turned our church into a makeshift store.”
I tell her about my last trip to the area, including my interest in collecting Sasquatch stories.
“There’s been a lot of activity in the last few months,” she says, chopping celery on a cutting board. “People hearing screams and smelling that bad stink.”
I ask if she thinks the creatures exist.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. The problem here is that sometimes stories get passed along from person to person and get bigger and bigger with each telling. You never really know what to believe. That’s kinda how it is with small towns. And Bella Bella’s no different.”
Bella Bella, though small, is the largest community on British Columbia’s central coast. It’s a way station appearing like a mirage in the ethereal blue-green dreamscapes of the Inside Passage route to Alaska—a coastal thoroughfare for cruise ships, ferries, freighters, yachts, and fishing boats. The town sits near the outer edge of a knot of channels and passes, next to the open ocean.
Bella Bella is split between two precincts, reflecting the area’s fractured landscape. The main town, straddling the northeastern corner of Campbell Island, is Bella Bella proper, the seat of the Heiltsuk First Nation. A smaller community of nonindigenous residents clusters around the village of Shearwater, a fishing lodge and marina built on the site of a World War II naval base on neighboring Denny Island. All together, some fifteen hundred people call the area home.
Geographical isolation, human catastrophes, and a history of government exploitation and abuse have left social and economic scars on the community. In the winter of 1862–63, a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out in the city of Victoria and spread—killing tens of thousands of indigenous people across British Columbia. It nearly destroyed the Heiltsuk, whose surviving members from across the territory resettled near today’s Bella Bella.* Over a decade later, the Canadian government, bent on controlling and assimilating the country’s indigenous populations, drove residents of First Nations onto reserves and began to set up residential schools to Christianize and “civilize” them. For more than a century, children nationwide—150,000 in all—were forcibly separated from their parents and placed in these church-run education centers, which strictly forbade them to speak their languages and practice their cultures under threat of punishment. Abuse—physical, psychological, and sexual—was rife in the schools. Thousands of students died in abhorrent, spartan conditions. Meanwhile, the logging and commercial fishing industries expanded their operations on the coast in the twentieth century, extracting huge numbers of trees and fish without much thought for the long-term environmental consequences, giving little more than employment to nearby communities.
In spite of everything, Bella Bella doesn’t resemble other indigenous communities in Canada, many of which have fared worse under the same circumstances. The Heiltsuk are blessed with an abundance of resources, an accessible location, and picture-postcard surroundings that draw in tourists. The nation’s territory is not ceded through any treaty, and its political life is vibrant and organized. The Heiltsuk are a proud and social people. Ethnic and family bonds are tight. Cultural events, including those tied to ceremonial food harvesting (collecting herring spawn and seaweed, canning fish, and digging clams), only fortify that cohesion.
Unfathomably deep roots are the basis of Bella Bella’s extraordinary resilience. The Heiltsuk have occupied their territory for at least fourteen thousand years.* For millennia, prior to European contact, they and their neighbors forged one of the most sophisticated nonagricultural societies on the planet. Like the ancient Greeks or the Polynesians, the Heiltsuk have always been a maritime people, known for the enormous oceangoing canoes that whisked them between coastal settlements at the mouths of creeks and rivers, and beyond into the open sea. Before disease dwindled the nation’s numbers, as many as twenty thousand people are believed to have inhabited up to fifty villages and seasonal camps spread across thousands of square miles of