"It is known to Tsleil-Waututh that our origin story is in this salt water, right here," Charlene Ts'simtelot Aleck said.

She sat on a rock looking out over səl̓ilw̓ət, or Burrard Inlet, from the beach at Whey-ah-wichen. The beach, also known as Cates Park, was a summer village not long ago, when the Tsleil-Waututh population was 10,000 strong, and European settlers hadn't arrived at the far west corner of Turtle Island.

Across the inlet is Say-mah-mit, which was once a populous village for Tsleil-Waututh. Now, the site is home to Noons Creek Hatchery, and surrounded by the young city, Port Moody. Aleck tried to point out the waterfront at Port Moody, but the view was blocked by a large tanker.

It's very narrow at the end of the inlet, and the other end only looks a stone's throw away.

"My mom was saying she used to swim across, and sometimes she would race her cousin," Aleck said. She gestured to the Burnaby Westridge Marine Terminal. "When the industry started coming in, her dad wouldn't allow her to swim across anymore because of the current and all the undertow."

"And then she talked about the times they'd get in their single-paddle canoes and be gone in the morning, and come back at night, and just be paddling and paddling and paddling. Just going around, eating off the beach, and the berries," Aleck continued.

She said she will sit on her paddle board on the water, surrounded by the lands where her people have lived since time out of mind and think about what life may have been like.

There would have been villages on all the beaches around her, including much of North Vancouver, Burnaby, Belcarra and Port Moody. From a vantage point on the water, one can still see pictographs on the rocks.

Before, there were so many people at what's now known as Belcarra that it was called təmtəmíxʷtən, which means "the biggest place for all the people."

But after being weakened by smallpox, Tsleil-Waututh were uprooted by settlers with all their belongings and remains from the land on the south side of the inlet. Indian agents, federal officials who enforced the Indian Act, assigned them a small reserve in North Vancouver.

Though their history across the water was interrupted, Tsleil-Waututh are finding their way back to their territory across the water with the help of allies.

Tasha Faye Evans, an artist and a Coast Salish woman living in Port Moody, approached city council with the idea to build a gateway into Port Moody's Rocky Point Park. The waterfront park faces Deep Cove, where the Tsleil-Waututh reserve is located.

"I wanted to raise a beautiful gateway," she said. "When I brought it to that current city council, they were not supportive... The mayor even said, 'That's never going to happen.'"

She chalked this up to a "colonial mentality" whereby the council didn't understand the significance of acknowledging Indigenous Peoples or meeting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 calls to action to advance Indigenous rights and reconciliation.

She didn't get approval for a gateway, but it was the beginning of her journey to commission a house post to be raised at the Say-mah-mit village site.