Copyright thespinoff
Joel MacManus visits Vancouver, where a First Nation is building a massive complex of apartment towers on its reserve land, with no city council permission required. Could this be the future of iwi-led housing in Aotearoa? I thought Sen̓áḵw might be hard to find, amidst a sea of skyscrapers in a city of three million people. It wasn’t. The three black and copper structures are unmissable. Tall and wide, they have a heavy, dominating presence that sets them apart from the skinny glass towers that populate central Vancouver. Sen̓áḵw (pronounced seh-nauq) is being built on a federally-recognised First Nations reserve with several millennia of history. Under Canadian law, reserves are exempt from city zoning bylaws, meaning the tribal authority of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) decides for itself what can be built there. And they set their sights sky high. These three towers will eventually become 11, containing 6,000 apartments and at least 9,000 residents. When it’s complete, it will be the most densely populated new development in North America; the population of Morrinsville in a land area smaller than five rugby fields. The tallest tower will be 171 metres tall, the same height as the Vero Centre in central Auckland. It’ll be a massive influx of housing in a city that desperately needs it – and an enormous monument to indigenous ambition in the modern age. That’s why I’ve flown 11,400 kilometres across the world to visit some half-built apartments. I want to learn what made this development possible, and what it would take to replicate it in New Zealand. Is this the new model of mana motuhake? Could honouring te Tiriti o Waitangi be the key to solving the housing crisis? As I arrive at the construction site, I’m waved through the front gate into a cloud of dust and beeping machinery. I’m disoriented by the sheer size of the place, and spend a few minutes wandering in circles, hoping someone will notice how lost I am and point me in the right direction. Eventually, I find the man I’m looking for at the on-site tuck shop. Wilson Williams is a third-term member of Nexwsxwníw̓ntm ta Úxwumixw, the elected council of Squamish Nation, which represents 4,300 members. He has a round face, a warm demeanour, and wears a silver eagle pendant around his neck. We convene at his shipping container office, where renderings of the completed development line the walls. He begins by telling me about Sen̓áḵw in the time of Na7t’kwi kwekwín̓ (the long, long ago). For 4000 years, Sen̓áḵw was the Squamish people’s most social village. At times of abundance, they would gather here from around the wider Vancouver area to celebrate potlatches (traditional gift-giving ceremonies and feasts). When European colonisation of Vancouver began, the Squamish remained living in Sen̓áḵw while the city boomed around it. In 1877, it was officially designated as Kitsilano Indian Reserve No.6. But eventually, the land was stripped away by a familiar combination of bureaucracy and government force. By the early 20th century, colonial authorities thought the village had become an eyesore and was standing in the way of the city’s growth. In 1913, while many of the residents were away, government officials strongarmed 20 men into selling the land. Families were loaded onto a wooden barge with whatever belongings they could carry and sent to live at a different reserve. When the remaining residents returned, they found their village reduced to smouldering ash. Even at the time, there was widespread acknowledgement that the sale was illegal. Newspapers reported that the attorney general of British Columbia, William Bowser, had threatened the men into selling by saying, “You will get nothing at all for your land, not one cent… Now which do you prefer, $11,250 or nothing? Here is your cheque. If you want it you can take it, and draw your money for the land, or you can leave it.” In the years that followed, the land was further alienated. A Y-shaped section was taken by the federal government for the Canadian Pacific Railway, another chunk to build a bridge to downtown Vancouver, and more still for a public park which features a monument to George Vancouver, the British naval officer who first charted this part of the country. The Squamish Nation never forgot. Williams’ great-grandfather Andy Paull was a senior chief living at Sen̓áḵw when the land was confiscated, and dedicated much of his later life to getting it back. Decades of legal battles finally culminated in 2002, when the federal government handed back the Y-shaped strip of former railway land (4.7 hectares of the original 32ha reserve), plus a cash settlement of CAD$92.5m. Once they won the land back, the tribal authority had to decide what to do with it. The Squamish Council makes decisions through the “seven generations principle” – that every action made today should leave a better, more sustainable future for the next seven generations. The question, as Williams puts it, was: “what is the highest and best use of this land for Squamish people?”. This development is the answer they came up with. The key to the development’s immense scale is a series of partnerships with the private and public sectors. To support the construction, the Squamish Council sold a quarter of the homes to property developer Westbank Corp (which has since sold its share to OPTrust, one of Canada’s largest pension funds), and the construction was financed through a CAD$1.4b loan from the federal government. At the groundbreaking ceremony, led by tribal elders, then prime minister Justin Trudeau described it as “reconciliation in action”. “It was quite emotional,” Williams says of the ceremony. “Not only for me, but you could see our elders, especially, were more emotional than a lot of people. They’re one generation out from family living here. “Being back here, you can feel the spiritual connection and also the physical connection. It was not only a village and place of gathering with a lot of longhouses, we had burial grounds here. Being disconnected and totally forcibly taken away really hurt, but there’s a lot of healing that’s happening right now.” Part of the criteria for the federal loan was that 20% of the units (1,200 apartments) would be subsidised below-market rentals. Of those, 250 will be set aside for Squamish Nation members, which is likely the largest permanent population of Squamish this land has ever sustained. “We haven’t had anyone live here for over 100 years, unless they camped out on their own time,” Williams says. “Now, my daughter – she’s 18 – says she wants to move here.” In Aotearoa, post–settlement iwi entities, with large investment funds and portfolios of land rights, are rapidly becoming some of the most important players in the mission to address the housing shortage. With different financial structures and varying degrees of success, iwi are involved in the construction of tens of thousands of homes: Marutūāhu, Ngāti Whātua and Waiohua-Tāmaki are leading a 4,000-home urban village in Mt Albert. Waikato-Tainui is pursuing a 1,300-home master-planned community in Ruakara. Mana Ahuriri is developing a 1,000-home township near Napier. Ngāi Tahu Property has brought more than 4,000 residential sections to market across the South Island. Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei is a key partner on Downtown West, a major mixed-use development which will be the second-tallest tower in Auckland. To understand the potential – and challenges – of Māori housing developments, I spoke to the leaders of two Wellington-based iwi; one for whom the economic future is looking bright, and one that is finding things more difficult. Helmut Modlik is the chief executive of Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira, the iwi authority for Ngāti Toa Rangatira, based in Porirua. He stands the entire time we speak, gesturing enthusiastically about his plans for the future. It’s an energy that matches the bold ambitions of his iwi. With a net worth of $395 million and total assets of $794 million, Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira has the fourth-largest investment portfolio of iwi entity in the country and is by far the wealthiest per capita. In Ngāti Toa’s 2014 treaty settlement, the iwi received call-and-leaseback rights on 80 Crown properties around the Wellington region, mostly schools and police stations. The iwi had the right to buy the properties at full market rate and lease them back to the Crown at 6.25% per year. The terms went largely unnoticed at the time of the settlement. “We had a relatively modest cash settlement, and the Crown knew Māori people are conservative and probably didn’t expect them to exercise it,” Modlik says. When he became chief executive, he took a very different line: he wanted to buy all of them. Since 2022, Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira has taken out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans to purchase all the land is has rights to. The investment won’t make a cent for 20 years while it pays back the loans, but after that, the iwi will have a property empire worth north of a billion dollars, with a guaranteed income stream from the Crown leases. “That’s a loooot of money,” Modlik says with a grin. “We’ll be the largest landlord to the government of this country.” With its newfound economic strength, the iwi has big plans to invest in housing. Its largest development is Kenepuru Landing, a new suburb on the former site of the Porirua Lunatic Asylum, which will include 880 homes, a retirement village, an early childcare centre, parks, playgrounds, and a community hub, and eventually, a primary school. Kenepuru Landing began in 2016 in partnership with Carrus Corporation. Initially, it was a purely commercial play to bring in revenue for the iwi. But in 2020, Modlik decided they needed to pivot. “The housing crisis had got to the point where prices were precluding iwi members from participating. I inherited the rather counterintuitive situation where we were a 50% owner of a large residential housing development, and our people couldn’t get access to housing. So that didn’t make sense.” Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira bought out Carrus in 2021 and signed a new deal with Kāinga Ora and Porirua City Council, expanding the development to include public housing and below-market affordable housing. “The reason for us doing this has nothing to do with the reasons that most people get into property development. Our mission is to enhance the wellbeing, prosperity and mana of ourselves and our community, and that guides everything we do,” Modlik says, “So when it comes to a specific transactional opportunity, that’s the lens we’re looking through.” Around the same time, the iwi bought 950 state homes from Kāinga Ora and created Te Āhuru Mōwai, which is now the largest Māori-owned community housing provider in Aotearoa. Government rental subsidies make it a good investment for the iwi, and Modlik says they’re able to provide a more holistic range of services for tenants. “I’ve offered for us to take over all the social housing requirements in Porirua. We’re happy to buy it all… that’s a conversation which I hope to progress.” With a growing property development arm, expanding social housing services and huge income-generating investments secured for decades to come, he believes Ngāti Toa Rangatira is entering a period of long-term financial strength. “We will have this massive annual annuity, and I expect that we will put aside a proportion of that every year to continue to acquire land and then to make it available back to businesses and the community on a leasehold basis in perpetuity, until ultimately, we’ll have control of our tribal areas, as we once did. That’s the big vision.” It’s a different story 20km south, in central Wellington, at the offices of Taranaki Whānui Ltd. As I sit down opposite chief executive Kara Puketapu-Dentice in a glass-walled boardroom, he looks downright despondent. “We’re not cash rich. We don’t have millions of dollars that we can throw at housing developments. So when we do things, we’ve got to partner well, and the conditions have got to be right for it,” he says. He described the iwi’s investment strategy as “tūpuna-guided and mokopuna-focused” – informed by the wisdom of elders and aimed at supporting future generations. With uncertain economic conditions globally – and in Wellington especially – Taranaki Whānui isn’t rushing into anything. “We’ll probably be quite conservative in our approach. We’ll participate in activities and projects where we think that there is a good opportunity but a low risk and just weather through the current environment.” Taranaki Whānui’s treaty settlement, signed in 2008, included $25 million in cash and the right of first refusal to purchase approximately 2,000 properties in the Wellington area. Those rights are different from the call-and-leaseback rights Ngāti Toa has taken advantage of – and Puketapu-Dentice insists they’re not as impressive as they sound. Properties only become available if the government wants to get rid of them, which is often a sign that it has some serious liabilities. But occasionally, the right opportunities arise. Taranaki Whānui Ltd has taken a few swings in the world of residential housing development. It was involved in the 56-home Paetutu project in Petone, the 109-home AroLiving development on Victoria St, and the 94-unit Hauwai apartment building in Mt Cook. But the iwi has been stung badly when it has tried to take on bigger projects, which may explain Puketapu-Dentice’s sense of caution. In 2009, Taranaki Whānui Ltd purchased a former defence force base at Shelly Bay on Wellington’s Miramar Peninsula for $13.3 million. It then sold the land to The Wellington Company, owned by property developer Ian Cassels, as part of a joint plan to create a $500 million seaside community with 350 homes, a hotel, and a shopping precinct. It was the beginning of an ugly 14-year-long saga that divided the city – and the iwi itself. Some locals complained the development didn’t meet “aesthetic standards”. Heritage advocates opposed plans to demolish the historic wooden military buildings. Environmentalists wanted the land kept as a nature reserve and raised concerns about coastal flooding. Billionaire film director Peter Jackson decried the development as “Soviet style apartments” and funded mayor Andy Foster’s campaign in opposition to it – though many speculated his true motive was to build a movie museum on the site. The most intense opposition came from within the iwi. A group of Taranaki Whānui members calling themselves Mau Whenua occupied the site for 525 days and launched legal action to stop the development. They felt the iwi authority had sold the land without the consensus of iwi members. The saga came to a conclusion in 2023 when Jackson bought the land from Cassels and cancelled the development. Cassels was publicly relieved to be done with the project, telling The Spinoff he was “tired of Shelly Bay”. Now that he’s a couple of years removed from the drama, Puketapu-Dentice feels the same way. “I think Shelly Bay presented itself at the time, obviously, to the previous negotiators, as a good opportunity to be explored. But the more you dig into that opportunity, you realise that it wasn’t actually. It was a very difficult opportunity to realise.” Just up the hill from Shelly Bay is another ill-fated Taranaki Whānui development: Mātai Moana. In 2023, the iwi trust presented a proposal, again working with Cassels and The Wellington Company, to turn the abandoned Mt Crawford prison site into a 700-home development with tower blocks up to 24m tall. Unlike Shelly Bay, it would be a leasehold arrangement, keeping the land in Taranaki Whānui ownership, which helped to assuage most iwi members. Because the Mt Crawford land was not zoned for this kind of housing density, Taranaki Whanui Ltd applied to the government for fast-track consenting under the Covid-19 Recovery Act. Again, neighbours responded with outrage. Hundreds of nearby residents attended public meetings opposing the development, labelling it a “slap in the face” and an “eyesore”, complaining about the height of the buildings, and the increased traffic it would bring. The government declined the fast-track consent, in part due to the community opposition. Puketapu-Dentice still believes Mātai Moana would have been a worthwhile project. “I think the proposal that we put out there, from an urban design and urban development perspective, would have provided for a significant need within Wellington. It would have provided housing for key workers – and beautiful views,” he says.“I think the challenge that we’ve got in Wellington, and across the country, is that people don’t like change. People don’t like density. People have an aversion to those types of activities and development in general.” The story of the Mātai Moana project has played out countless times in New Zealand, especially in urban centres. Restrictive zoning and regulations make it easy for anti-development activists to stop housing from being built in their neighbourhood. For Taranaki Whānui and many other iwi, these rules have become roadblocks on their path to economic independence. They’re looking to projects like Sen̓áḵw as an example of policies that could give them greater self-determination over their land. “We think that the provision of zoning that is beneficial towards the expression of our tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake is totally aligned with our vision of being tūpuna-guided and mokopuna-focused,” Puketapu-Denitice says. “It’s very important that we can secure our presence and our way of living, as Taranaku Whānui, here in our place, because we will never leave.” Back at Sen̓áḵw, Williams and I are greeted by site superintendent Edward Belsham, a member of the McLeod Lake Indian Band, part of the Tse’khene Nation. He hands us hard hats, hi-viz and steel-capped gumboots and leads us to the first tower. There, he directs us into an external service elevator – a square box attached to the outside of the building. Belsham punches in a floor number, and it rips off the ground, disconcertingly fast. Through the perforated metal floor, I can see the ground disappearing below me. “This is the best free theme park ride you’ll try,” Belsham laughs. We emerge on the 33rd floor, a concrete floor with no walls except for a small safety railing. The workers who bustle past us are unfazed. The views of the Vancouver skyline and the mountains behind it are stunning. Vancouver is often considered a city of skyscrapers, with 71 buildings taller than 100m (by comparison, there are 20 in Auckland and 3 in Wellington). But those towers are largely confined to the downtown core. Sen̓áḵw sits across False Creek in the suburb of Kitsilano, where the density drops off sharply. Looking down from the edge of the building, the neighbouring homes look minuscule. Much of the surrounding land is zoned only for single-unit or duplex dwellings. The area is defined by large wooden houses, leafy streets, coastal bike paths, and some of the highest housing costs in the country. The Kitsilano Residents Association pushed back against the Sen̓áḵw development for years, complaining it would be too tall, too dense, put too much strain on existing infrastructure, and would limit access to the public park. The irony, not lost on Williams, is that the name the residents’ association takes for itself, Kitsilano, comes from August Jack X̱ats’alanexw, a Squamish chief and an inhabitant of Sen̓áḵw before the land was illegally taken. This kind of motivated and well-financed neighbourhood opposition could easily stymie a typical high-density development. But Sen̓áḵw is not your typical development. The residents’ association filed a wide-ranging lawsuit against the City of Vancouver, attempting to stop the project. It was roundly dismissed by the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Justice Carla Forth’s ruling made it clear: “municipalities do not have the power to regulate zoning and land use planning on Indian reserve lands.” In other words: Sen̓áḵw is functionally Nimby-proof. “We want to work with the neighbours,” Williams says. “But at the same time, we’re not going to change what we’re doing. We’re here to allow people to understand and comprehend that this is the new way of us sustaining ourselves as people and adding value to the community.” The steel towers rising from the ground have sparked a debate about what it means to be indigenous. Gordon Price, a prominent Canadian urban planner (who is not indigenous), criticised the project on the CBC: “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.” Williams laughs when I bring up that comment. “People said some outrageous things. You can tell they’re naive,” he says. A week earlier, Williams was at Vancouver City Hall for hearings on another housing development that the Squamish Nation is pursuing in partnership with two other First Nations, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh): Jericho Lands, a 13,000-home development on a 90-hectare former military site in the wealthy seaside community of Jericho Beach, about five kilometres from Sen̓áḵw. The written submissions included a lot of discourse about indigeneity from residents who did not identify themselves as indigenous. “This plan isn’t in harmony with indigenous values. This much density is not healthy for human and other living things!” – Sarah George. “What happened to the promise and value held by our Indigenous community to honour our mother earth, to treat it with love and respect? A concrete, glass towering community is contrary to the design of their traditional villages.” – Glady Loewen. “The First Nations Tribes, as stewards of the land should give great consideration to this land’s unique geography as opposed to profits only. 47-storey buildings do not fit within this philosophy or model.” – Richard Schwadel Like Sen̓áḵw, Jericho Lands is on reserve land, so this opposition is unlikely to affect the development. But it was a reminder that the journey of reconciliation has a long way to go. “It was hard to hear. They want to protect their box and not have that open heart and mind that they should have. There’s a lot of education that still needs to be done,” Williams says. “We’ve always been caretakers of the land; we never take more than we need, but this is a solution of today.” In 2024, the newly coronated Māori Queen, Nga wai hono i te po, made her first public appearance at Tuahiwi Marae near Rangiora. She did not speak, as she was observing a ritual period of grieving. She listened as speakers from around the motu paid tribute to the man who had called them there, her late father, Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII. The event was Te Pūnuiotoka, a national hui for Māori unity. The hosts, Ngāi Tahu, described it as “a space to kōrero about indigenous economics and tribal institution-building”. Over the course of the day, the rights of iwi to make decisions about developments on their own land emerged as a major theme, and repeated comparisons were drawn to the Canadian system. Justin Tipa, the chairman of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, highlighted the legal barriers to developing collectively owned Māori land. “Our reserves and much of our land are essentially dead capital. Look at you here – you’re on a 2200-hectare reserve surrounded by paddocks…We need to reclaim this institutional space, replace the Crown structures with structures of our own, and do it better.” Dr Te Marie Tau, director of the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury, said, “Local government tells you what to do. If you want to build a house, you will have to ask them for permission. When our ancestors signed the Treaty of Waitangi, they did not believe they would be doing that…There will be a time, shortly, when we won’t be going to local councils for permission to build. There will be a time, shortly, when our revenue from the cities and our rates will be managed and regulated by us.” One of the invited speakers was Chief Derek Epp of Ch’íyáqtel First Nation, based Chilliwack, British Columbia. He described his nation’s rise towards economic independence. In 1990, the Ch’íyáqtel reserve was 90% reliant on government funding. Today, 90% of revenue is generated by the nation itself. How did that happen? The story begins in the city of Kamloops, about 350km northeast of Vancouver. In 1962, the city had a shortage of industrial land, so the local First Nation, Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc (Shuswap Nation), used some of its reserve land to create an industrial park for local businesses. However, the nation struggled to fund roads and drainage that the businesses needed. Chief Clarence Jules Sr said at the time: “We provide the services and the province collects the taxes. We should collect the taxes to pay for better services and infrastructure; otherwise we can’t compete for business.” In 1988, after decades of campaigns, protests and policy development, the Canadian federal government passed Bill C-115, known as the Kamloops Amendment to the Indian Act, which made Chief Jules’ vision a reality. It gave First Nations the ability to levy taxes on their land, which, importantly, let them borrow against future tax revenues. The Shuswap Council introduced property taxes, allowing it to build infrastructure and grow the industrial park from 11 original businesses to over 150 today. The Kamloops Amendment kicked off a revolution. Across Canada, 373 First Nations have since adopted self-governing financial structures, including the Squamish Nation. But the legal ability to tax and borrow was only the start. Building a development as large as Sen̓áḵw in the middle of a major city brought with it many other complications: water connections, energy sources, street sweeping, rubbish removal – all the boring but essential services needed to make a neighbourhood liveable. None of them are automatically provided to the Sen̓áḵw lands, which sit outside the jurisdiction of the City of Vancouver. The solution was an extensive service agreement with the City of Vancouver, a 250-page contract that is repeatedly described as a “government-to-government relationship”. Tenants in Sen̓áḵw will pay the equivalent of council rates to Squamish Nation, who will then pay the city an annual sum for the full range of services other Vancouver residents receive. The world’s biggest fanboy for this 250-page document might be Canadian-born Dr Eric Crampton, the chief economist of the New Zealand Initiative. He has written extensively about Sen̓áḵw, spoke about it at Te Pūnuiotoka and recently published a research note titled Building Nations: What Canada’s First Nations can teach us about devolution and development. The New Zealand Initiative might seem like an unusual champion for Māori land reform. The think tank is known for its conservative, free-market stances. It’s literally part of the Atlas Network. But Crampton sees Sen̓áḵw as an example of localism, devolution, and greater individual property rights – all causes the New Zealand Initiative supports. Plus, he argues, it gives better effect to the intentions of the Treaty of Waitangi: “How could any self-governing people signing a treaty believe that they would be required to go and beg some council official’s permission, miles down the road, to be able to make some changes at the marae? Nobody could have possibly imagined that was what they were signing up to.” The reason Crampton is so enamoured with the Sen̓áḵw service agreement is that “every line of it is a way of solving a problem.” The pages are littered with complexities: Who pays to upgrade a pipe serving the reserve but located off-reserve? Who covers the public transport improvements that the development will need? Should Sen̓áḵw contribute fully to the parks budget, or get a discount for providing its own amenities? Can utility services still enforce city bylaws? What if the Squamish Nation changes its business licensing? “Every line in that service agreement is an answer to some Wellington bureaucrat who’d say, ‘No, it’s impossible to do this’…. It’s 250 pages of solutions. The first problem that comes to mind – oh, here’s a solution. Second problem that comes to mind – oh, here’s a solution. All the way through.” Canada’s system of First Nations reserves is different from Māori land laws, but Crampton believes there are enough parallels for New Zealand to make it work. He suggests that New Zealand could pilot a version of the Kamloops Amendment by allowing an iwi or hapū with collectively-owned land to tell central government that it wishes to establish itself as a local authority with “council-plus powers”; the ability to set rates, decide zoning, and some technical changes to how Māori land tenure works. “You’d still need some kind of negotiation with the adjacent councils over infrastructure services, and then we’re on a promising path,” he says. “I like the idea of starting with a trial, seeing how it works, building up the institutions and the capabilities,” he says. “If the experiment succeeds, then that builds confidence that the next step could be worth trying. And if it doesn’t, well, you fail at small scale.” As my time at Sen̓áḵw draws to a close, Williams points out the design features inspired by indigenous cultural principles. Large feature walls that will display work by First Nations artists. Gathering pavilions that will be shaped like longhouses. The balconies will be connected by steel trigons, a symbol of Indigenous unity. He tells me to go take a closer look at the concrete ramp leading down to the underground garage. I cast him a confused glance, but do as he says. As I approach the side of the ramp, the finer details come into view. It doesn’t look like concrete at all. It looks like wood. The entire piece was cast to resemble native cedar timber, with lines and swirls and knotted holes. The sides are laser cut with Squamish expressions. The longest is: I Cháyap Tl’iḵ Nat Twka Sen̓áḵw Úxwumixw (“We have returned home to Sen̓áḵw, our community”). Walking back to the office to return our hard hats and hi-viz, Williams tells me about his parents, both of whom survived Canada’s notorious residential schools, where indigenous languages were discouraged or prohibited. “They grew up being ashamed to share their language, even though my great-grandmother spoke fluent Squamish. They lived a life of confusion.” He sees Sen̓áḵw as a turning point for his people, triggering a renaissance of pride and independence, with more first-language Squamish speakers, contributing to the future of Vancouver, led by their culture and ways of being. “We’ve come a long way within the last 20 years to create that hope for the future,” he says. “The hope for tomorrow is being completely proud of who we are and where we come from.” I exit Sen̓áḵw through the main gate, leaving the noise and dust behind me. I walk along the waterfront path, around the original boundaries of the reserve, and look back at the buildings one last time. A banner on the side of the largest tower reads: “Built on history. Literally.”
