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When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of the Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco, California, to Port Gamble, Washington, in 1896, faced two agonizing options: abandon ship into the roiling sea and head toward shore through a rock-riddled shoal or stay aboard and hope the hull would hold.

Captain Atwood chose the latter and ordered his nine crewmen to lash themselves to the rigging to avoid slipping off the tilting deck and into the ocean’s frothing gullet. So bound, they waited until darkness slid into light. As the shoreline morphed into view on that November morning, the men got a sense of their position. The ship was pinioned to a reef, being rocked and hammered by the Pacific. The shore was tormentingly close, just 400 meters or so away, but the span too perilous to cross.

The Puritan had run aground on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, near Bonilla Point, about 110 kilometers west of Victoria. Today, the sobriquet “Graveyard of the Pacific” is hackneyed, but in the late 1800s, when colonial expansion was well underway in western North America, the graveyard—a stretch of coastline roughly from the Columbia River in the United States to northern Vancouver Island—acquired ships on the regular. In what probably seemed like an uninhabited middle of nowhere, Atwood and his men waited for a miracle. Luckily, they were actually in the inhabited middle of somewhere—a coastline that for millennia had been home to Indigenous peoples. Did the mariners think they were delirious when shadowy apparitions at the forest’s edge resolved into flesh-and-blood men and started wading toward the schooner?

Waist deep in the churning sea, the men tied a stone to the end of a fishing line and tossed it toward the crew. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. For almost eight hours, a newspaper later reported, they threw the line and the Puritan crew tried to catch it.

Finally, a crewman hooked the line and attached a heavier line to the smaller one. The rescuers then dragged the line to shore and secured it, allowing the crew to sling themselves to safety as if on a zipline. From there, the Indigenous men escorted the Puritan’s crew to a nearby shelter where they provided food and stayed with the men until help arrived.

Map data by ArcGIS

Sixty kilometers up the coast and 128 years later, another rescue is underway. On a drippy, monochrome February afternoon, nine men on three boats scan the rocky shore of Trevor Channel near the small village of Bamfield. They’ve been alerted by a “pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan” call—marine radio lingo for an urgent but not life-threatening situation: “At one-six-zero-zero Pacific Standard Time, this station received a report of overdue kayakers in the vicinity of Trevor Channel, Robbers Pass,” coast guard radio reported. Three kayakers missed their scheduled check-in call and are considered overdue.

From a boat nearby, Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, watches the boats watching the shore. He’s the one who instigated this search an hour earlier, when he tossed three bald, floppy, PFD-wearing manikins into the water, securing them in place with small anchors. “Don’t be a dummy and lose the dummy,” he quipped as he tethered one with the name tag Julio to a buoy near Robbers Passage.

The nine men searching for Julio, and his friends Amy and Carl, are in Bamfield for immersive training in marine search and rescue. They come from four First Nations along the BC coast, the farthest from the Nisga’a First Nation village of Gingolx where the Nass River empties into the Pacific, north of Prince Rupert. Most have taken a few days just to get here, tasked by their communities to take part.

The intensive course is part of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue (CNSAR) program, which provides support and training, as well as equipment and infrastructure, to coastal First Nations. The program has been evolving since its inception in 2015, and today, about 27 participants a year take the training in Bamfield, just one of a suite of programs under the coast guard’s Indigenous Community Response Training umbrella. The instruction and formal support are recognition that, like the men who rescued the crew of the Puritan, some of the coast’s most capable search and rescue specialists have been quietly at work since 1854 and no doubt long before. On New Year’s Day of that year, British Columbia’s first recorded shipwreck happened on the west coast. The 14 surviving crewmen of the British brig William were taken ashore and sheltered and fed by Indigenous people living near Pachena Point, just up the coast from where the Puritan wrecked nearly 43 years later.

Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, coordinates a mock search for missing kayakers in Barkley Sound, British Columbia, during a week-long search and rescue course in February 2024. The intensive training is part of a comprehensive program of the Canadian Coast Guard that supports coastal First Nations with search and rescue skills, safety equipment, and other resources.

Getting to this point—where some coastal nations are more formally integrated into search and rescues and receive world-class support and training—required foresight by coast guard brass and a great deal of trust by First Nations. Recognition of their on-the-ground expertise within their territories and acknowledgment of their historical participation in rescues—saving survivors, recovering and sometimes burying bodies, getting word of the wreck to lighthouses or nearby settlements—has been long in coming. At best, rescuers in the past were acknowledged with a passing mention in the newspaper, or perhaps a medal or the award of cash. At worst, they were hanged.

A few days before the mock search for Julio and his friends, the first 2024 cohort of CNSAR participants gathers at McKay Bay Lodge in Bamfield. They’ve settled into their rooms and are gathered in the main lodge for orientation. Over dinner, they dispatch stunning mounds of spaghetti and talk quietly among themselves. Every once in a while, murmurs crescendo into cheers—several are streaming the annual All Native Basketball Tournament on their phones and they all have community teams in the competition. The tourney is in its 64th year, and it’s a big deal for the nations who travel to Prince Rupert for the friendly, but also fiercely competitive, week-long event. The shared experience and good-natured goading provides a bit of levity.

Dinner is also punctuated a few times by Scooby-Doo’s ruh-roh. It’s participant Tim Davidson’s text alert from his wife back on Haida Gwaii who’s eight-weeks pregnant and checking in regularly. Within a few minutes of meeting Davidson on the dock earlier that day, he’d shared that it’s the first time he’s been away from his young son. He gripped the front of his PFD, revealing a tattoo of a small hand—the size of his boy’s at three weeks—on the back of his.

Tim Davidson from the Haida Nation, on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, was one of nine participants in the week-long search and rescue training held at the coast guard station in Bamfield, British Columbia.

After dinner, the group crowds onto the couch and armchairs in the lodge’s small living room, the fire in the woodstove snaps, and the large picture window clouds with moisture. This cohort just happens to be all men—women also take part—and ranges in age from 24 to 58. As they pass around a hefty coil of cedar-bark rope, a gift from a past participant that is used as a talking stick of sorts, the men share where they’re from and why they’ve come. Almost all mention their families, either their immediate relations or the larger extended family—aunties, cousins, grandparents, and other elders—of their coastal homes. They’re excited to be here, perhaps nervous and unsure of what to expect, but ultimately they’re eager to gain skills that will serve their communities. They’re all watermen, have spent their lives on boats, and are often tasked with searches since there’s no one else to call—the coast guard can be several hours away. Often, that means searching for a friend or relative. “Picture a 16-year-old kid riding up the river in the dark going to look for your cousin,” says William Smythe of Gingolx, his voice hesitant. “That’s how it started [for me].”

Most have been tasked to come by their communities because they’re already serving in emergency capacities. Warren Aster, from the Gitxaała Nation on British Columbia’s central coast, is emblematic of this. He does community policing for his nation, serves in the fire department and as a first responder, and does environmental monitoring such as water quality testing and abalone surveys. Similarly, Fabian Stewart, from Gingolx, is fire chief and bylaw officer and is always called upon for rescues, whether they be on land or water. “If [there’s an emergency] and you have a running boat, you’d better go out and look,” echoes Smythe, Stewart’s lifelong friend.

In mariners’ parlance, these boats are “vessels of opportunity”—vessels in the vicinity of an incident that can respond. Because in British Columbia there are dozens of coastal First Nations communities—many of which are boat- or floatplane-access-only and where many residents will learn to drive a boat long before they can drive a car—it stands to reason that many of the first first responders on scene will be people from these communities. Such was the case on October 25, 2015, when two fishermen from Ahousaht, a First Nation village of about 1,100 people just up the coast from Tofino, a popular resort destination on Vancouver Island’s west coast, spotted a distress flare. It had been sent from the Leviathan II, a Tofino-based whale watching boat that had capsized. The fishermen tried to get through to the coast guard on channel 16, the emergency channel, but the reception was poor. They also roused their community of Ahousaht on marine VHF channel 68, the radio frequency used for everyday communication within the village. Within minutes, community members mobilized in their own boats. In the end, the Ahousahts helped rescue 21 people and retrieved the bodies of five. The coast guard also responded, as did other boats in the area, but the event brought into sharp relief the fact that First Nations people are often first on scene in marine emergencies and that the coordination of rescue efforts between First Nations and federal authorities was “lacking,” as Roger Girouard, then assistant commissioner for the Canadian Coast Guard said in the accident’s aftermath.

The whale watching boat Leviathan II sank near Tofino, British Columbia, on October 25, 2015. People from the First Nations village of Ahousaht were instrumental in alerting authorities to the accident and in rescuing the survivors. This accident, and others that occurred before, highlighted the fact that First Nations people are often first on the scene when marine tragedies occur. Photo by Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press

The Leviathan II, as well as the sinking of the BC ferry Queen of the North in 2006—in which the people from Hartley Bay, within Gitga’at First Nation territory, helped get 99 passengers and crew safely to shore—were two dramatic and catastrophic events that demonstrated First Nations people were the “absolute best asset in terms of a first-on-scene resource for marine search and rescue,” says Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard.

When the Leviathan II sank in 2015, the coast guard was taking its first tentative steps to more formally work with First Nations and had started to reach out to communities, but the accident spurred the effort and the 2017 Oceans Protection Plan provided seed funding. The CAN $1.5-billion federal initiative to improve marine safety and protect and restore marine ecosystems included significant investment for coastal First Nations to provide training, equipment, and coordinated planning for integration of local teams into search and rescue operations. Carrow and two other staff were dedicated full-time to crafting the Indigenous Community Response Training program in British Columbia. From the beginning, Carrow knew that for the relationship to work, it had to be led by the communities and it had to be built on trust. First question: Were the communities interested in a more formalized relationship? If so, what did they need? The coast guard’s efforts needed to be tangible and dependable. First Nations were all too accustomed to people arriving on their shores unannounced or with grand pronouncements or ideas to impose.

Since the first recorded contact was made on the BC coast in 1774, when Spanish explorer Juan Pérez on the ship Santiago traded briefly with Haida and Nuu-chah-nulth people, unknown ships have often proved problematic to Indigenous peoples. Explorers, traders, sealers, churches, Indian agents and other representatives of governments took many things: resources, cultural artifacts, fishing gear, children. They left other things behind: diseases, missionaries, burned villages, destroyed canoes, confusion, mistrust.

Worldviews and ideologies collided in February 1869 when the bark John Bright was wrecked on a boulder-studded stretch of shore near Estevan Point, Vancouver Island, losing all 22 on board, including the captain’s wife and children and their nanny. It’s unclear whether the disaster was witnessed by Hesquiaht people of the area, but sometime after it happened, a group came upon the wreck and the beach strewn with bodies, some without clothes, arms, heads. They carried the remains above the high-tide line; some they buried.

Weeks later, a passing trader, known for his less-than-scrupulous behavior, brought news of the wreck to Victoria, where the tragedy was twisted and sensationalized in the British Colonist, the newspaper of the day, fomenting outrage in the capital’s citizenry. The victims had been alive when they got to shore, the self-proclaimed witness insisted, only to be murdered, raped, and defiled on shore—heads cut off “to preclude the possibility of identification,” and the “bodies stripped of all clothing.”

When a body is tossed from a ship and onto a shoreline of boulders and reefs, it churns like a rag doll in a rock tumbler. The head, heavy as a bowling ball, is often the first to disarticulate. Feet also detach, and limbs; the clothing is peeled off by abrasion and the sea’s icy fingers. Coroners know this, and it’s likely that people living on the coast have long known this, too.

The surgeon aboard the gunboat HMS Sparrowhawk, the ship used by the colonial government to dispense law and order along the coast, said as much when he assumed the role of coroner and inspected exhumed bodies, noting that he could find no medical evidence to indicate that the bodies had been decapitated by human hands. He wrote in his notes that wild animals and pounding surf likely accounted for the injuries.

The HMS Sparrowhawk was one of several heavily armed Royal Navy gunboats used by the colonial government in the late 19th century—an era of intense colonial expansion in Western Canada—to assert British authority and protect colonial interests along the coast. Photo by UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

When the Sparrowhawk arrived on their shore, the Hesquiahts seemed unconcerned and willingly cooperated, including showing the items they’d salvaged from the wreck. Still, despite the coroner’s testimony, officials aboard the Sparrowhawk determined foul play and demanded the villagers turn over the perpetrators. When none were forthcoming, Royal Marines came ashore and burned houses and destroyed canoes. Finally, seven men—five witnesses and two accused—were seized and taken to Victoria for trial.

Against an all-male, all-white jury and unrelenting newspaper coverage, two Hesquiaht men—John Anayitzachist and Katkinna—were accused of murder and sentenced to be hanged. With the men in irons, the Sparrowhawk took them home to their village where they were executed on the beach in front of their community. David Higgins, publisher of the British Colonist, couldn’t resist a final smug volley when he reported that the gallows was left in place as a “lesson” to other “evil-disposed Indians.”

It’s no wonder that it can take time for coastal nations to trust the government when it comes calling, even a century and a half later.

The best advice Carrow received when he first started with the Indigenous Community Response Training was from a supervisor who told him to visit coastal First Nations communities, spend time on the docks, and ask, “How can I help?”

“We didn’t show up with a plan,” Carrow says. “We didn’t show up saying, ‘This is how we’re going to do things.’” Instead, he introduced himself to locals and learned who was often called on for searches or to help tow boats or otherwise offer marine assistance. He found those people whose doors others banged on at 2:00 a.m. when there was an emergency. Then, he explains, he chatted with them about their search and rescue experience, toured their boats, and asked what equipment they might need, such as flares, PFDs, first aid kits, or radios. If they’re going out in their personal boats to help people, “we need to get them the equipment they need so that they’re safe on the water and that they can communicate with us,” says Carrow.

Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard, leads the Indigenous Community Response Training program, which supports search and rescue capabilities within First Nations communities along the BC coast. Photo courtesy of the Canadian Coast Guard

Over eight years, he’s been a consistent face of the program, with strong relationships in First Nations communities. Government officials are too often thought of as driftwood, he says; “We come and go with the tide.”

Today, the program is multifaceted. Carrow, Kerr, and their colleagues regularly visit about 20 coastal communities a year to deliver equipment and get updates on training needs, and they offer different options for skills training, from the thrice-yearly Bamfield intensive to a recently developed “soft landing” program that brings participants to Victoria to tour the coast guard station there, meet staff, and see how they, and their community, can fit within the program.

Fabian Stewart, left, and William Smythe from the Nisga’a First Nation take a cold-water plunge off the dock at the Canadian Coast Guard station in Bamfield, British Columbia, before practicing person-in-water rescue techniques.

Carrow’s team supports a broad range of people to build the search and rescue capacity along the coast. Most comprehensive are the self-run and community-led Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary stations. Eight are currently operational, with two more in the works. They’re in places that have a demonstrated search and rescue need—where communities already do a significant number of searches, and which aren’t easily served by regular coast guard stations. These units have purpose-built rescue vessels with appropriate equipment, and they get the most intensive training. Carrow and his colleagues also support community members who are on the water for work, for instance: coastal guardians, teams trained to respond to environmental emergencies, and even water taxi drivers and fishermen. When Carrow does his introduction at the Bamfield CNSAR course, he sums up the program’s philosophy: “We’re trying to figure out how to best support you so you can continue doing what you’re doing out there, which is rocking it,” he says. “But we want you to come home safe.”

Safety on the water includes excellent communication, and that’s a constant theme during the week at Bamfield. As the participants go through the mock rescue of the missing kayakers, Kerr constantly stresses clear communication, both on the boats and over the radio. “[We want to] get them in the habit of communicating with us,” says Kerr. “Us” means the coast guard and the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria. For teams used to getting the job done on their own, linking into the greater coast guard’s more rigid set of protocols can take some getting used to.

One of the boats calls in to Kerr, who is rescue lead: “Exercise radio, exercise radio. This is RHIOT 2. We have a possible person in the water at four eight, five three, decimal, zero five north; one two five, zero seven, decimal, five three west.”

Kerr asks their intentions—they’ll investigate, come alongside, and pull the person out of the water—and confirms he’ll pass on the details to the rescue coordination center.

Participants in search and rescue training retrieve a manikin from the water near Robbers Passage, British Columbia.

About four minutes later, RHIOT 2 reports back that they’ve recovered Amy, that she is “cold but otherwise fine,” and that they are keeping her warm and will transport her to Bamfield for further care.

Faux kayakers safe and accounted for, the participants return to Bamfield at dusk. But the day’s exercises aren’t over yet. They have unceremoniously hauled the rescue manikins aboard during the scenario, and now it’s time to learn proper techniques. Illuminated by the spotlights on the Bamfield coast guard station dock, the men jump into the frigid Pacific and spend the next hour learning PIW—person in water—recovery techniques, taking turns being victim and rescuer.

Alec Dick, from Ahousaht, was one of the first to take the plunge with the CNSAR program back in 2016. Dick carried out emergency services for his community, so when the Leviathan II sank in 2015, his house became a command center of sorts. His living room window looked out toward the scene of the disaster, and he monitored the community boats heading out to respond. “The coast guard wasn’t on site yet,” he explains. “I was telling these guys that if you have people on board, get going to Tofino.” After the initial disaster, the community continued to help in the search for one missing person. “We did locate [him] a few days later,” he says.

Dick motions to another location visible from the beach where a float plane with three Ahousaht people on board crashed in 2010, another accident that initiated a full-on community response. A water taxi driver from the village was first on site, and his ability to pinpoint the location where the plane sank was invaluable to coast guard divers when they arrived. On the off chance someone had made it out of the plane, community members walked and boated the beaches and rocky shorelines for days after. There were no survivors, and the incident was a sobering reminder that search and rescue response in these small communities often means looking for a loved one.

Alec Dick, from the Ahousaht First Nation, has been an active participant in the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue program since it began and has been instrumental to its success. Photo by Adrienne Mason

Dick’s years of emergency response experience made him an ideal contact when the coast guard was looking to have a more formal relationship with coastal nations. “After the [Leviathan II] happened, we had a big meeting with the Canadian Coast Guard and other government people, and I was asked if I was willing to become part of the auxiliary coast guard,” he says. It was a welcome change in attitude. “I think they finally realized they need to be working with First Nations. We knew it a long time ago, that we needed to be interconnected in some way to work together.”

Ahousaht’s chief and council agreed to the coast guard’s offer to craft a program together, and Dick became one of the first to go through the Bamfield course. He’s a leader in the CNSAR program, and his instrumental role in helping to develop the program earned him a BC lieutenant governor’s award for maritime achievement. Although he leaves a lot of the responses to younger members now, he’s still fully involved in the CNSAR program as the board chair of the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary and is regularly asked to do presentations about the organization. Most recently, he spoke at a meeting of the International Maritime Rescue Federation in Victoria.

The rapport with the Canadian Coast Guard has come a long way in eight years from what “was a bare-minimum relationship, that was more or less ‘you go your way, I go my way,’ you know?” Dick says. Whether it was a change of the guard, or a change in attitude and understanding, he says that now they’re “putting trust in one another.” Adding, “it’s a working relationship … that is so rewarding for both sides.”

That working relationship was put to practice in a dramatic rescue on January 25, 2022. A water taxi en route to Ahousaht slammed into a rock, thrusting its four passengers, who were sitting on bench seats, forward into the next row, and the driver into the windscreen. The driver managed to get a Mayday out and both the Ahousaht Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Tofino-based coast guard responded. Tom Stere, rescue specialist at the Tofino station, quickly dispatched with another crewman and headed to the scene. The seas were calm, but dense fog swathed the coast, cutting visibility to just 15 meters, if that. When they arrived, the Ahousaht coast guard crew was already on site, tied alongside the damaged boat, and assessing the scene. “Because of their training, the communication was seamless,” says Stere. As senior officer, he took charge of the response and tasked the Ahousaht members with various roles. By this time, other private vessels from Ahousaht had arrived, too, ready to offer assistance as needed.

It was a chaotic scene. There were multiple injuries in a very small space filled with gear and bent seats, so extraction was challenging. The passengers had numerous broken bones, including one woman with a severely traumatized face, and the captain had a head injury. To add to the challenge, a bottle of dish soap had exploded, and the interior was slick with detergent, blood, and broken glass.

Working together, the teams extracted the passengers, got them ready for transport, and sent them to Tofino on the boats standing by. All but one of the passengers were medevacked out of Tofino for treatment.

For Stere, it was a game changer having the Ahousaht team. “To be frank, it reduced my anxiety,” he says. He knew he had competent people on scene, with the appropriate gear—first aid, stretchers, pumps, for instance—with complementary training. “They’re a critical component of our [search and rescue] response, without question,” he says.

Stere has lived in Tofino for 37 years and has been with the coast guard for 33. He’s pleased to see the new, formalized relationship and the acknowledgment that these communities have always been there to rescue people in their territorial waters. “It’s a major shift in the culture and mindset of the coast guard,” he says, adding that it’s permeating throughout the organization.

Participants from coastal First Nations in British Columbia practice boating skills during a week-long search and rescue training program.

Carrow agrees. Ever mindful that CNSAR funding could be cut with a change of government, he’s working to ensure that it’s not just Carrow and his team who have the relationships. “They need to be held throughout the coast guard, from the newest employee to the most senior executive,” he says. Exposure to the program will make its importance crystal clear, he contends. What we’re doing with CNSAR is not trivial, not lip service, he says. “[The program] is working and we’re saving lives.”

The successes of the CNSAR program spurred its expansion across Canada in 2022 with the second phase of the Oceans Protection Plan. Today, the Canadian Coast Guard has Indigenous search and rescue programs under development on the Atlantic coast and in the “central region,” which encompasses Ontario, Quebec, and the Arctic coast.

For a government that has made many promises around reconciling past injustices with First Nations people, it would be convenient to point to the CNSAR program as proof of progress, a box checked. While the initiative has clearly shown success, Carrow is cautious about using the word reconciliation lightly. True reconciliation doesn’t come with a program, he says. “It’s got to be a personal relationship.” Building relationships and trust takes time, especially with government.

After almost a decade working closely with Carrow and the CNSAR program, Dick can feel the shift. He’s experienced new levels of openness and trust, and he sees an agency committed to more meaningful involvement with First Nations. “Not just to see them, but to hear them,” he says.

Alex Baildham, center, manager of operations and training for the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary, reviews navigation skills with, from left, Warren Aster, Gitxaała Nation; Tyrese Short, Kyuquot/Checleseht First Nations; William Smythe, Nisga’a First Nation; and Dale Robinson, Gitxaała Nation.

Acknowledging past harms and how they can reverberate for generations often takes time, too. In November 2012, after petitions by the Hesquiaht First Nation, the BC government “expressed regret” to the Hesquiaht people and the families of John Anayitzachist and Katkinna for their wrongful hangings 143 years before. The federal government also exonerated the men in 2018.

Before these apologies, in 2008, master carver Tim Paul erected a pole in honor of his relative Anayitzachist on the beach at Homais, the place where he was hanged. It depicts a shark, an octopus, and, on top, Anayitzachist. Though its vibrant blue-and-red paint has now mostly faded to silver, the pole still stands, its base carpeted by a lush growth of thimbleberry and salal. Anayitzachist looks out to sea, watching for those passing by and those who might land on this shore.