The Tsawwassen First Nation, a Coast Salish people, have been here for a very long time. The oldest archaeological site on English Bluff dates back about 4,200 years, and eight prehistoric villages have been unearthed on the peninsula. Through the nineteenth century, in the words of the nation's own account, they were stripped of their lands, rights and resources by colonial settlement -- a process so thorough that the community that had given the place its name ended up on a fraction of it. A treaty with British Columbia, concluded in 2009, restored roughly 724 hectares of treaty settlement land northwest of the suburb, bounded by the strait on the west and by the numbered street grid on its other three sides. It was among the first modern urban treaties in the province, which is to say the first time this particular arrangement had been renegotiated in something other than the settlers' favour.

The Spanish expedition of Jose Maria Narvaez came through in 1791 and charted the Point Roberts peninsula as Isla de Zepeda. What Narvaez chose to record about the place says as much about him as about it: an incredible quantity of rich salmon, and a large Indigenous population speaking a language unlike the others his party had encountered along the coast. He was, without quite realizing it, describing an economy. The salmon runs of the Fraser, passing this shoreline on their way to the river mouth just north, were the reason anyone lived here at all. European settlers arriving decades later cleared the forests for farms, which is the version of the landscape that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century.

Nineteen fifty-nine changed Tsawwassen twice over. The ferry terminal arrived at the end of its new causeway, linking the Lower Mainland to southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. Inland, the Massey Tunnel opened under the Fraser River, connecting Delta to Richmond and cutting the drive to Vancouver dramatically. The real estate boom was immediate, and the farms went under subdivisions within a generation. The street pattern they went under was older than any of it: a rigid north-south, east-west grid inherited from the surveys of the British Royal Engineers in the nineteenth century, with avenues numbered upward from the American border. The original names survive only in local memory and municipal records -- Cemetery Road is now 8th Avenue, Point Roberts Road is now 56th Street, Summer Avenue is now 1st.

That 56th Street is the reason Tsawwassen matters to a few thousand Americans. It is the only road access to Point Roberts, Washington, the exclave stranded on the southern tip of this peninsula when the 49th parallel was drawn straight across it. Cross the line and the street becomes Tyee Drive; this is the westernmost land crossing on the whole 49th-parallel border. There used to be a second one. The seaside neighbourhood of Boundary Bay, which began in the 1890s as a summer colony for well-off Vancouverites and still has some of the original cottages, sat directly against Maple Beach on the American side, joined by a customs post at the foot of 67th Street. It closed in the 1970s. Two beach communities that had been one now face each other across a line nobody may step over.

Tsawwassen is the sunny corner of Metro Vancouver, sheltered enough to hold a warm-summer Mediterranean climate with some of the mildest winters and smallest daily temperature swings in Canada -- a genuine rain shadow on a coast famous for the opposite. Boundary Bay, on the east side, is a major stopover on the Pacific Flyway, and the dyke path along its edge carries walkers past tens of thousands of migrating birds in season. On the west side, the bluff above the strait was almost entirely private until Fred Gingell Park opened a stairway and trail down to Tsawwassen Beach. It remains the only public access to that shoreline, and it was controversial precisely because exclusivity had been part of the property value. Locals climb it repeatedly for exercise and call it the Tsawwassen Grind.