1876 – The Tla’amin Nation

The Tla’amin Nation (ɬəʔamɛn), historically known as Sliammon, are a Coast Salish people whose ancestral territory runs along the northern Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. For 8,000 to 12,000 years, the Tla’amin people have long inhabited and governed a homeland centred around qathet (Powell River/Powell Inlet). Their territory extends through the Malaspina Strait and encompasses mainland village sites, river systems, and numerous islands.

 According to Tla’amin oral history, they are deeply connected to the land itself through origins, a connection supported by early ethnographic and colonial records documenting a well-established Indigenous legal and territorial order.¹

The principal village site of the Tla’amin people is known as t̓išosəm, with a seasonal village site called tiskʷət (Tees’kwat) located at the mouth of the river from θaʔyɛɬ (Tha-yelh) at Powell Lake. Additionally, there are several other traditional village sites occupied by the Tla’amin, including:

– toqʷanan – Theodosia Inlet

– toxʷnač – Okeover Inlet

– p̓aq̓iʔaǰɩm – Maple Village, Cortes Island

– ʔagayqsən – Ahgykson Island (Harwood)

– qʷoqʷnɛs – Stillwater

– χakʷum – Grief Point

– t̓atlaχʷnač – Blubber Bay

The village sites we recognize today are vibrant elements of Tla’amin’s oral traditions, some of which are mentioned in 19th-century colonial correspondence. The beautiful river and inlets of qathet were truly at the heart of Tla’amin life, thriving with salmon fisheries, travel routes, and trade networks. The surrounding islands played a crucial role in their culture, being central to their way of life rather than merely considered as outlying areas.

ʔayʔaɬɬ (Ahgykson Island) is consistently recognized in Tla’amin oral history as a sacred island and a burial site. It has also been acknowledged in provincial records for its cultural protection. Áyhus (Savary Island), Ahgykson Island (Harwood Island), and Hernando Island, while often stripped of their Indigenous names or lacking Indigenous names in colonial maps, frequently appear in oral testimonies and ethnographic sources as essential locations for seasonal harvesting and travel within Malaspina Strait⁴.

Before European contact, Tla’amin society existed through kinship networks, potlatch laws, and seasonal movements across land and sea. The cedar forests, salmon streams, clam gardens, and reef-net sites defined both subsistence and governance. Place names carried laws and history, highlighting ancestral use, responsibility, and memory of an Indigenous system of spatial understanding that was later overlooked or replaced by colonial renaming practices. ⁵

Colonial intrusion intensified in the mid-nineteenth century as explorers and officials imposed British sovereignty without any treaties. They renamed the region of qathet as Powell River and reconfigured Indigenous land into surveyed parcels. The correspondence of Malcolm Sproat, the Indian Reserve Commissioner, along with the minutes from the Joint Indian Reserve Commission (1876–1879), document the unilateral creation of small reserves at t̓išosəm (Sliammon – Tla’amin) and nearby sites. These actions excluded some important islands, many fishing areas, and key village locations.⁶

These records show that reserve boundaries reflected settler priorities rather than Tla’amin land use. The imposition of the Indian Act, residential schools, and bans on governance practices such as the potlatch further disrupted Tla’amin social systems.⁷ Despite these pressures, Tla’amin continuity endured. Elders preserved oral histories tied to qathet, ʔayʔaɬɬ (Ahgykson Island), and surrounding islands, maintaining knowledge absent from colonial maps.

Twentieth-century industrial development at Powell River (qathet) profoundly altered the landscape, yet Tla’amin families remained rooted in place through fishing, wage labour, and cultural transmission.⁸

A major restoration of authority occurred with the Tla’amin Final Agreement, which was effective in 2016. The Agreement formally recognizes Tla’amin self-government, land ownership, and law-making authority, drawing explicitly on oral history, archaeology, and archival documentation to affirm longstanding occupation and governance.⁹

Today, the Tla’amin Nation actively revitalizes language, reasserts Indigenous place names alongside colonial ones, and protects culturally significant sites. From time immemorial to the present, the Tla’amin’s relationship to land and islands remains continuous, rooted in ancestral law, affirmed by record, and carried forward through self-determination.

To Learn about Tla’amin Place Names: https://qathetmuseum.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/place_names_project_2018.pdf

To Learn and Hear Tla’amin words: Download Sliammon Language App

Author’s Note: qathet was a name gifted in June of 2017 and has been widely recognized for the district formerly known as the Powell River Regional District, which changed its name on July 5, 2018, to honour the history of the Tla’amin Nation and its traditional territory.

Footnotes

1. Homer G. Barnett, The Coast Salish of British Columbia (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1955), 16–25; Wilson Duff, The Upper Sunshine Coast (Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1952), 7–12.
2. Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG 10, Indian Affairs, vol. 1274, Indian Reserve Commission correspondence and letterbooks, 1877–1880.
3. Tla’amin Nation, Tla’amin Final Agreement (Ottawa / Victoria: Government of Canada and Province of British Columbia, 2016), chap. 2; British Columbia Archaeology Branch site records for Ahgykson Island.
4. Duff, The Upper Sunshine Coast, 18–22; Barnett, Coast Salish, 54–57.
5. Barnett, Coast Salish, 239–247.
6. LAC, RG 10, vol. 3611–3613, Joint Indian Reserve Commission minutes; Malcolm Sproat correspondence, 1876–1879.
7. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report, vol. 1 (Ottawa, 2015), esp. sections on British Columbia.
8. Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 199–205.
9. Tla’amin Nation, Tla’amin Final Agreement, Preamble and Chapters 1–4.