Ceremony

What the river lost, the people remember.

After a long winter in Bella Coola’s Coast Mountains, the arrival of the ooligan was a time of celebration for the Nuxalk people. It brought vital nourishment and medicine. For 26 years they have been gone. The Nuxalk Nation carries this absence like a wound: an ecosystem collapse entangled with smallpox, occupied land, and silenced culture. Now, as one family builds the first home back in their ancestral village, something stirs in the river.