The creation story, as told by the Tseshaht, begins with a girl called Nasayilim -- 'Sky Day' -- who was awakened to see two figures: an old man and a shaman. The old man cut his left side, and the shaman collected the blood that flowed from the wound. He blew on it, creating what the Tseshaht call ts'chsy'a'pi, the 'life pulse.' From this breath and blood, a boy named Naasiya'atu -- 'Day Down' -- was created. The boy and the girl grew up together and had many children. The Chief in the Sky made an island, high and dry, called Ts'isha' for the people to live. The boy was given a war club with blood along its edge and told to keep it on the beach so the tribe would never die. There are several versions of this story, but they converge on the same truth: this island is where the Tseshaht began.

Benson Island is small and irregularly shaped, roughly half a mile at its longest points, with a rugged shoreline broken by two rock beaches on the northeast and southeast sides. A blowhole on the west side hisses and spouts during high tides. The northeast beach holds the remains of a former Tseshaht village, marked by a cultural shell midden extending approximately 985 feet along the shore -- layers of clamshell, bone, and charcoal that archaeologists have dated to over 5,000 years of continuous use. The Tseshaht used C'isaa as a home village, following the seasonal cycles of sea mammals, salmon, and other resources throughout Barkley Sound. The midden is not just refuse; it is a record of daily life stretching back to an era when the Egyptian pyramids had not yet been built.

By 1865, British Admiralty charts labeled the island as Hawkins Island. In 1893, a sealing captain named John W. Benson purchased it and built a large home on the east side. The home eventually expanded into a small hotel for visitors. A 1922 report in the Victoria Colonist described ten acres of cleared land planted with a garden and orchard to supply the hotel, then owned by Mrs. Benson, 'widow of an old-time sealing captain, and one of the early pioneers of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.' It is a peculiar chapter in the island's history -- a hotel on sacred ground, gardens growing where the Tseshaht had gathered food for millennia, a brief colonial interlude on a timeline measured in thousands of years.

In 1970, most of the Broken Group islands were folded into the newly designated Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, and Benson Island became a popular destination for sea kayakers and recreational sailors. But the island's deeper significance was never forgotten. In 2009, Parks Canada and the Tseshaht First Nation reached an agreement to prohibit all camping on the island due to its cultural importance. An interpretive display was installed in 2012, including a tall wooden house standing post carved by Tseshaht artist Gordon Dick -- a marker that says, in wood and story, that this place belongs to the people who were created here. Day visitors are still welcome to land and learn about Tseshaht history, but they cannot stay the night. The island is open to understanding, not to occupation.