Cortes Island
| Cortes Island | |
|---|---|
| Waters | Salish Sea |
| Archipelago | Discovery Islands |
| Geographical location | 50 ° 7 ′ N , 124 ° 58 ′ W |
 |
|
| length | 25 km |
| width | 13 km |
| surface | 130 km² |
| Residents | 1007 (2011) 7.7 inhabitants / km² |
Cortes Island is an island at the north end of the Georgia Strait . It is located in the Strathcona Regional District in British Columbia , Canada and is part of the Discovery Islands . The island is separated from West Redonda Island to the northeast by the Lewis Channel and the Malaspina Peninsula to the east by Desolation Sound . The 1007 inhabitants of the island (excluding the residents of the First Nation Reservation Tork Indian Reserve 7 ) are divided into the three towns of Mansons Landing , Squirrel Cove and Whaletown .
traffic
The island can be reached by ferry from Quadra Island , a seaplane or a flight to Cortes Island (Hansen Airfield) Airport .
economy
There used to be fishing, logging and coal mining on the island. Today there is a campsite near Smelt Bay Provincial Park .
history
The island belonged to the traditional territories of the Klahoose and Tla'amin ( Sliammon ).
In 1792 the island was named after Hernán Cortés during an expedition by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores .
In 1862 a severe smallpox epidemic reached the Klahoose. Remnants of another tribe were reunited with the surviving Klahoose and relocated to Squirrel Cove , on the eastern end of Cortes Island. The Tla'amin felt the same way. The Paukeanum 3 reserve (80.9 ha) is located on the west coast of the island, north of Smelt Bay.
Numerous whalers - a train station was built in Whaletown in 1869 - lived from exports. But within two years the whale population collapsed completely and the station was closed again. Missionaries from the Order of the Oblates came to the island in the late 1860s.
Michael Manson of the Shetland Islands was the first to settle on the island in 1886 and established a trading post at what is now Manson's Landing . His steamboats and the fish caught by the Klahoose and their neighbors supplied the coal mines. The joint fishing fleet of the Sliammon, Klahoose and Homalco comprised more than 100 boats before 1970. In 1893 the first post office opened for the 40 inhabitants of the island, a few years later 12 pupils were taught.
The first church was built in 1896. Large parts of the traditional area were sold, but the Klahoose, like all First Nations , had no right to buy. From 1920 the children had to attend the residential school in Sechelt , which existed until 1975. First the island received a ferry service to Quadra Island , in 1969 to Vancouver . In the 1940s, the Watchman system, an original mediation and compensation system, which the Oblates had increasingly converted into a control and punishment system, disappeared .
In 1989, numerous residents of Cortes Island protested against the deforestation by the timber company MacMillan Bloedel. Ten years later, the Klahoose chief, Kathy Francis, signed a contract with the Cortes Ecoforestry Society for the ecological use of the forest on the island . The trigger was the sale of the entire crown land on the island to Canadian Forest Products Ltd. - without consulting the Klahoose. The Klahoose owned a small area in the interior of the island. The Tla'amin are keen to reach a contractual agreement with British Columbia.
Island Timberlands has obtained a 2600 acre logging license, including the last remaining Douglas fir that has never been felled. The company is owned by Brookfield Asset Management , New York , which has rights to drive 2.5 million acres worldwide. Due to considerable resistance from the islanders, the company stopped the logging it had announced in January 2012.
In fiction
There is a short story by Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro entitled “Cortes Island”, which is included in The Love of a Good Woman (1998, in German in Die Liebe einer Frau , 2000). The story does not take place on the island, but it is about weighty memories of a paralyzed and mute old husband that happened there. His wife, writes Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star on October 10, 2013, "was once an interesting woman of insatiable sexual desire." He tries to tell his secret to the young lodger.
Web links
- Cortes Island . In: BC Geographical Names (English)
- Cortes Iceland on britishcolumbia.com (Engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Strathcona B - Census Subdivision Profile. Census 2011. In: Statistics Canada . March 1, 2013, accessed July 18, 2013 .
- ^ Andrew Scott: The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names: A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia. Harbor Publishing, Madeira Park (BC) 2009, ISBN 978-1550174847 , pp. 135-136
- ↑ According to: Sliammon, Reserves ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Heather Mallick: Alice Munro's 10 best stories , Toronto Star , October 10, 2013
