The Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation once again welcomed a boatload of visitors to its ancestral home of Yuquot for the 32nd annual Summerfest celebration.
The MV Uchuck III departed from the Gold River dock on Aug. 3 to land for an afternoon at the ancient village site on the southern shore of Nootka Island. Since 1992 Mowachaht/Muchalaht members have returned to Yuquot each summer to camp at the remote site, which served as the First Nation’s main reserve community until it was moved to the Gold River area in the early 1970s.
The camp-out tradition was started by the late Tyee Ha’wilth Ambrose Maquinna.
On Aug. 3 his son, the current Tyee Ha’wilth Yahtloah, Mike Maquinna, welcomed visitors to Yuquot, as part the tradition his father started “to re-establish Yuquot as a global site for cultural exchange and renewal.”
Yuquot was the first point of contact between Europeans and British Columbia’s coastal First Nations people, when English Capt. James Cook stopped at the village during his search for the Northwest Passage in 1778. At the time Yuquot was a central location of trade and whaling for northern Nuu-chah-nulth, a site with eons of cultural history that archaeological records have shown stretch back at least 4,300 years.
