Qualla: Savary Island

Savary Island: Introduction

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quinn Desilets, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the Ayajuthem language of the Tla'amin people, this island has two names. The first is Ihohs, meaning "double-headed serpent." The second is Kayaykwon, an allusion to the three freshwater springs that sustain life on what is essentially a ribbon of glacial sand adrift in the northern Strait of Georgia. Both names capture something essential about Savary Island: it is a place of duality, of fresh water emerging from salt surroundings, of wildness persisting within reach of civilization. Just 7.5 kilometers long and barely a kilometer wide, Savary shelters roughly a hundred year-round residents while swelling to two thousand in summer, when seaplanes buzz the Friday evening sky and water taxis shuttle passengers from the nearby hamlet of Lund.

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Image: Quinn Desilets | CC BY-SA 4.0

Savary Island: The Serpent's Back

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromSerbia, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tla'amin have known this island for over four thousand years. Archaeological evidence across more than thirteen registered sites documents millennia of Coast Salish habitation, from a large settlement along the eastern shore to a signal station perched on the island's highest...

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Image: NotFromSerbia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Savary Island: Murder at the Edge of the Map

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromSerbia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jack Green arrived around 1886, the first non-Indigenous permanent resident, building a cabin and store on the point that bore his name. For a few years, Savary's tiny European settlement operated in the manner of remote frontier outposts everywhere: quietly, and mostly on trust....

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Image: NotFromSerbia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Savary Island: Sand Dunes and Arbutus Groves

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromSerbia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Savary is geology in motion. Composed almost entirely of glacial till, marine clay, and sand deposited by Pleistocene meltwater over twenty thousand years ago, the island has no bedrock except at its eastern tip around Mace Point. Without external sediment sources, erosion and ac...

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Image: NotFromSerbia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Savary Island: An Island of Light and Paint

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quinn Desilets, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the early 1900s, visual artists were drawn to Savary's particular quality of light. By the 1930s, the Vancouver School of Art established summer sketch camps based at the Royal Savary Hotel, where students produced a mimeographed newsletter called The Savary Pudding. Painter...

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Image: Quinn Desilets | CC BY-SA 4.0