Sea Wolf Adventures blog
Notes from the territory
Bears, whales, salmon and the people who have watched them here for thousands of years. Written by the guides who take you out, so you know what to expect before you step on the boat.
Latest post
Latest
Ethical Grizzly Bear Viewing Great Bear Rainforest | Sea Wolf Adventures
The grizzly bear has thrived in Kwakwaka’wakw territory for as long as our people have. How we watch bears, keeping our distance, reading their behaviour and knowing when presence becomes intrusion, comes from generations of living alongside them.
Read the post ›All posts
All posts
Indigenous Entrepreneur-Led Grizzly Bear Tours Great Bear Rainforest | Sea Wolf
On an Indigenous entrepreneur-led tour in the Great Bear Rainforest you learn how the Kwakwaka’wakw understand the grizzly bear: its behaviour, its place in the ecosystem and the protocols that have governed our relationship with it for thousands of years.
Read the post ›
When the Tide Drops: How Grizzly Bears Read the Shoreline in Knight Inlet
When the tide pulls back in Knight Inlet, grizzlies are already working the rocks for crabs and mussels. Spring foraging follows the routes and tides their mothers taught them, and a bear we know as Thimble teaches her cubs the same way.
Read the post ›
Where Wilderness Becomes Home: A Lodge Experience Rooted in Territory
Arriving by helicopter at a lodge built on stilts above the high-tide line, guests are not consuming an experience. They are being invited into relationship with a place that has been home to the Kwakwaka’wakw for millennia.
Read the post ›
Navigating Ancient Waters: Whale Encounters Through Kwakwaka’wakw Territory
The humpbacks and orcas of the Broughton Archipelago are relatives returning home, not specimens. A Kwakwaka’wakw guide reads the kelp beds, the gulls and the stillness before a whale rises, so the crossing itself becomes the experience.
Read the post ›
The Living Rainforest: How Indigenous Knowledge Shapes Every Wildlife Encounter in the Great Bear
The Great Bear Rainforest is not a backdrop for wildlife but a living relative, and it has never been empty. Every encounter on our tours starts from that understanding, carried by the Kwakwaka’wakw since time immemorial.
Read the post ›
The Sacred Cycle: Salmon, Shell Midden, and the Kwakwaka’wakw Way
The shell middens along these shores are libraries, not garbage heaps: layers of salmon, clam and herring laid down over thousands of years that record how the Kwakwaka’wakw and the returning salmon have sustained each other.
Read the post ›
Spring Emergence: When Grizzlies Wake in the Great Bear Rainforest
In March the ice breaks and grizzlies push out of their dens lean and hungry, the males first and the mothers with new cubs later. What wakes them, where they go and why it matters for the whole coastal ecosystem.
Read the post ›
Grizzly Bears of the Wild: What to Expect on a First Nations-Led Bear Watching Tour in BC
What a day on the water with Sea Wolf Adventures looks like: leaving Port McNeill aboard a Sea Wolf vessel into Kwakwaka’wakw territory, guided by people whose knowledge of the grizzly bear comes from generations of living here.
Read the post ›
Sea Wolf Adventures Featured as Fresh Take on First Nations Tour
Travel + Leisure on seeing British Columbia through fresh eyes on a First Nations tour, with Sea Wolf Adventures among the Indigenous-led journeys that give the province’s mountains, forests and waters new meaning.
Read the post ›
How Will You Celebrate Canada 150?
Before celebrating Canada 150, consider what these 150 years have meant for Indigenous people: residential schools, a potlatch ban that outlawed our culture for 66 years, and communities still fighting for clean water, health care and education.
Read the post ›
Cetacean Connections
June brings the whales back: humpbacks, minkes, killer whales, dolphins and porpoises. Our connection to them runs deep, as the late ‘giga̱me Yaḵała̱nlis, Ernie Willie, told it in a Musgamakw Dzawada̱’enux̱w story of a young hunter and the max̱inux̱.
Read the post ›
People of the Wild: Mike Willie
Destination British Columbia profiles Mike Willie, T’ɬalis, who grew up in remote Kingcome Inlet and built Sea Wolf Adventures around reconnecting to land and language through cultural revitalization.
Read the post ›
Reconciling Both Worlds
“In order to move forward we must reconcile both worlds,” my late uncle Ernie Willie would say. A hereditary chief initiated into the Hamat̕sa at eight and later an Anglican minister, he lived that reconciliation, and the Kingcome totem pole beside the church tells the same story.
Read the post ›Passing On Our Teachings
Looking back to pave the way forward is one of the best principles our old people had. Why K’odi and I teach Kwakwaka’wakw culture at the Gwa’sala-‘Nak’waxda’xw School, and memories from the drum log where the teachings were passed to us.
Read the post ›
Ethnobotany Field Trip
A day on Yukusam with University of Victoria’s Indigenous Language Revitalization students: humpbacks in Blackfish Sound on the way over, then the island’s groves of culturally modified trees, a living record of Kwakwaka’wakw forestry, with researcher David Garrick.
Read the post ›What an Amazing Day!
Our grand opening at Telegraph Cove brought two cultures together on the historic boardwalk, with our dances, a warm welcome from the Cove and four hereditary chiefs showing their support for the new venture.
Read the post ›Sea Wolf Adventures’ Grand Opening Tomorrow
Sea Wolf Adventures opens on July 6, 2013, with a new Stabicraft vessel built for rough water and a purpose beyond tours: sharing our people’s past, present and future, and putting business behind language and culture revitalization.
Read the post ›
Ready to see it for yourself?
A full day on the water from Port McNeill, with Indigenous guides, in search of grizzlies, humpbacks and orcas.