The bay's newcomers arrived in the 1960s. Everyone else had been here considerably longer. Storm Bay lies in shíshálh territory - specifically that of the téwánkw, the group associated with the Sechelt, Narrows, and Salmon Inlets - and the archaeological evidence puts continuous habitation here at roughly eight millennia. The proof is underfoot: shell middens, the compacted remains of countless meals, built up over so many generations that they alter the soil chemistry and the plants that grow in it. Middens are the quietest kind of monument. They record not a single event but the accumulated ordinariness of people eating dinner beside the same water for eight thousand years, which is a harder thing to build than a monument and a far more convincing one.

The twentieth century arrived with saws and ambitions. Storm Bay was logged hard and homesteaded early, and the stumps left behind still carry the rectangular springboard notches where fallers wedged in planks to stand on above the swollen base of a tree. In 1907 the Sechelt Brick & Tile Company Limited put up a small brickworks on the bay, betting on the local clay. The clay was not good enough, and the operation closed after two years. Fourteen years later the Canadian government tried again on a much larger scale, building a substantial brick plant in 1921 as a "returned men's project" - work for veterans coming home from the First World War with nothing arranged for them. It failed too. Two attempts, one bad clay deposit, and a bay that declined to become an industrial site.

What arrived next was harder to categorize. Beginning in the late 1960s, people loosely connected to the intentional community movement began settling Storm Bay, and an unusual number of them turned out to matter to Canadian art. Kate Craig, who co-founded Vancouver's Western Front Society in 1973 and ran its media program from 1977 to 1993, kept a cabin here and spent roughly eight weeks of every summer in it from 1976 onward. Glenn Lewis, another Western Front founder, was part of the circle, as were the artist Hank Bull, the filmmaker David Rimmer, and the choreographer Karen Jamieson. They were not retreating from the art world; they were commuting to it. Storm Bay functioned as the place where the work got made, and Vancouver as the place where it got shown. Craig died here in 2002.

The setting does most of the persuading. Storm Bay sits in the wet coastal forest of the British Columbia mainland, the kind of dense, moss-laden temperate rainforest where the light arrives filtered green and the ground never entirely dries. Sechelt Inlet is a long fjord system reaching back from the Strait of Georgia, steep-sided and sheltered, with Narrows Inlet branching off nearby. Access remains exactly what it has always been: a boat, or a floatplane on the water. No ferry serves the bay, no road reaches it, and the practical consequence is that everyone who lives there chose the inconvenience deliberately and keeps choosing it.

Three settlements have now been attempted in this bay. The oldest is still the most successful by an enormous margin - eight thousand years of shíshálh presence against two brickworks that lasted a combined handful of seasons. The artists' community sits somewhere in between, sixty-odd years old and still going, sustained by the same things that sustained the téwánkw: the water for transport, the forest for shelter, and a location remote enough that nobody with a better business plan has bothered to interfere. It is the rare place in coastal British Columbia where the industrial chapter is the brief one and the human chapter is the long one.