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The Kwiakah are shaping a stewardship economy built on reciprocity, science, and return.
From Campbell River, B.C., a boat trip of about 60 winding kilometres north past Quadra, Sonora and Thurlow Islands will take you to Phillips Arm, a steep-walled inlet on the mainland coast in Kwiakah First Nation territory. The journey in is slow — 90 minutes — but if you’re lucky, you’ll spot humpbacks cutting through green water or orcas surfacing with a misty spray. The real moment arrives as you round the last bend: mountains close in, dark and sheer, snow still clinging to their peaks even into summer.
“You’ll also see the scars,” says Gavin Woodburn, Kwiakah First Nation member and PhD candidate in geoscience at the University of Calgary. He means the clear-cuts — bare slopes striped with logging roads, the monotone patches of replanted conifers, and, on the steep western side, the char of a 2023 wildfire that burned for weeks.
“Philips Arm is the southern tip of the Great Bear Rainforest,” says Kwiakah Band Manager Frank Voelker. “You shouldn’t have long-burning fires in a temperate rainforest. If lightning strikes, it should burn a little — but a healthy rainforest doesn’t burn down.” For Voelker, the blackened ridges are evidence of two truths: modern forestry has failed this landscape, and the Kwiakah are choosing a different future.
The Nation — just 19 members, part of the Liǧʷiłdax̌ʷ, the southernmost of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw peoples — was diminished by disease and colonial policies, and pushed from their ancestral home nearly a century ago, with many community members settling in Campbell River. Returning has meant slowly rebuilding a presence, recovering ways of being and knowing, and finding a path toward a sustainable economy.
When they took possession of a decommissioned salmon farm, they saw possibility rather than ruin: floating infrastructure, anchorage, space for bunkhouses, labs, kelp lines, and long-term research.
After a million-dollar, multi-partner supported refit, the Kwiakah Centre for Excellence was born — a floating research platform where Indigenous knowledge and Western science meet to repair a damaged inlet. Opened in spring 2025, the station supports up to 16 researchers at a time — students, ecologists, climate scientists, forestry specialists — working directly on the land and in the water, with Kwiakah guidance embedded in every decision.
Science has always been part of Indigenous stewardship. For millennia, the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw relied on cumulative observation to guide management. This deep attention to place led to innovations such as terraced clam gardens that increased food yields, fish traps and weirs that maintained runs, and forest gardens rich in food and medicinal plants. These were highly sophisticated systems grounded in reciprocity and restraint.
Modern extractive forestry ignored that knowledge. The result, says Woodburn, is a depleted landscape his ancestors wouldn’t recognise. “That’s why the Kwiakah put their own resources into creating an open-air laboratory,” says Voelker. “If we can heal one inlet — if we can prove regeneration is possible and economically sustaining — others can follow.”
During the Centre’s first season, Woodburn was one of around 50 students to work in Phillips Arm. The opportunity to collaborate with the Kwiakah has also drawn respected scholars including Dr. Jennifer Grenz, a Nlaka’pamux ecologist; Dr. Myrle Ballard, Anishinaabe scientist, founder of the Three-Eyed Seeing framework (Indigenous science, Western science, and the lens of our relations — the beings, such as water and trees, that cannot speak for themselves) and Woodburn’s advisor; and Dr. Suzanne Simard, the academic lead of a Kwiakah-led MITACS Accelerate grant that’s bringing together dozens of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers to work with the Kwiakah and explore regenerative forestry after more than a century of industrial logging.
The goal, Voelker explains, is to prove that a stewardship economy — one that creates healthy, productive ecosystems — can be both viable and financially rewarding.
If we can heal one inlet — if we can prove regeneration is possible and economically sustaining — others can follow.
– Frank Voelker, Kwiakah Band Manager
But first, they need the data. “Western science focuses on a reductionist approach,” Woodburn says. “Indigenous science looks at the whole system.”
He points to a study site: an unhealthy third-growth forest, stunted after repeated clear-cutting. Researchers have set up thinning plots to track how sunlight influences regrowth — important, but incomplete. “So we bring Indigenous science and look at how the whole system can recover. We have clam gardens at the beach line, and biodiversity changes as you go up the slope.” It’s about learning to see the inlet as interconnected, rather than measuring one factor at a time.
Already, the reception to this information is shifting. “Our first research was considered unsolicited and ignored,” Voelker says. “Then we presented it through the legal frameworks of Aboriginal rights and title, so it had to be considered. Now government departments are reaching out — we’re seen as a leading entity in regenerative forestry research.”
For Woodburn and his Nation, restoration is not only ecological — it is cultural. “One day, I want this to be a place our ancestors would recognise again — a place where we can bring our youth to teach them about the land.”
Until then, logging continues in Phillips Arm, and the scars will remain visible for decades. But on the deck of a floating research station, an ancient idea is taking root — not extraction, but renewal. Not looking back in loss, but forward with responsibility.
Read another story by Diane, about regenerative tourism in the Yukon.
