On a sunny summer day, the view from Tofino’s First Street dock northward, across the Van Nevel Channel, is stunning. The 2,400-foot-tall Wah-nah-jus, or Lone Cone, arches above the tranquil surface of the Clayoquot Sound like the hump of a giant whale beginning a feeding dive. A few small skerries break through the sapphire blue glass of the Sound around the Island, like a school of porpoises frolicking alongside a whale. Red, white, and blue one-story houses, looking from a distance like bright Lego pieces, line up in a row along the water’s edge. This is the village of Opitsaht, “a gathering place” in Nuu-chah-nulth language, where for millennia Tla-o-qui-aht people would come together to spend the winter.

With about 200 residents, Opitsaht is the larger of two Tla-o-qui-aht reserves. It sits on the southwestern tip of a horseshoe-shaped Meares Island and the base of the Lone Cone Mountain; the higher and more massive Mt. Colnett rises on the Island’s opposite side. The village is reachable only by water, and there is a steady trickle of fishing boats, water taxis and cruise charters of different shapes, sizes and colours streaking back and forth across the channel.

The vista looks like a fresh painting that is yet to dry. The air is crisp, palpably buzzing and crackling with animate energy pulsating through Clayoquot Sound. But the atmosphere here and around the sound would be a lot less vibrant and the colours much more subdued if Tla-o-qui-aht people and their allies hadn’t risen up thirty years ago to change the course of local history. It was an uprising that ultimately reverberated around British Columbia (BC), the nation of Canada and the world.When in the 1980s, BC logging giant MacMillan Bloedel was preparing to clear-cut Meares Island, the Tla-o-qui-aht people and their allies took a stand against the logging industry. They didn’t do it for themselves — after all, many of them worked as loggers — but on behalf of the Wah-nah-jus Hilth-hoo-iss, also known as Meares Island, their home. To fulfill their hereditary obligations to the future generations, or “future ancestors” as they call them, they stopped the logging on the Island and around the Clayoquot Sound to ensure that their traditional territory could continue to sustain their people for all times.