Qualla: Kitty Coleman Provincial Park

Kitty Coleman Provincial Park: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. She died in 1918, around seventy years old, and within a year the neighbours had named the beach after her. That is an unusual thing for a settler community to do in British Columbia in 1919. Kitty Coleman was from Cape Mudge, a member of the We Wai Kai nation, and the surviving account of her life is short and mostly told by other people: she left her community to marry a white man, he was later jailed, and afterward she lived alone on this stretch of shoreline, selling fish and berries to whoever came by. That is the whole documented record of a life that ran seven decades. What remains is a name on a provincial park sign, a beach, a creek, and a stand of very old trees - a memorial assembled by people who apparently thought she mattered, even if they left almost nothing behind about why.

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kitty Coleman Provincial Park: The Edges of a Record

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. It is worth sitting with how little we know. The phrasing that survives in most accounts - that she "left her tribe" to marry - is the language of the people writing it down, not hers, and it flattens what was almost certainly a complicated decision made under colonial pressure t...

Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Kitty Coleman Provincial Park: A Park the Neighbours Run

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The beach became a community park in 1919 and a provincial park on 14 November 1944. Its official designation is Class C, which in British Columbia means something specific: the park is managed not by the province directly but by a local community board. Fewer than a handful of B...

Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Kitty Coleman Provincial Park: The Old Tree

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The southern section of the park holds Douglas firs of a size the Comox Valley has mostly lost. One of them, known locally as the Kitty Coleman Fir, is estimated at over five hundred years old and ranks among the largest trees left standing in the valley - a remnant of the forest...

Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Kitty Coleman Provincial Park: Facing the Strait

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The beach here is rocky rather than soft, sloping into the Strait of Georgia with the campsites set directly behind it - close enough that you can hear the water from a tent. Look east and the far shore is the Powell River coast on the mainland, close enough on a clear day to pic...

Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0