Floating Cabin

Potts Lagoon is a still surviving, although not exactly thriving float home community, anchored in a narrow cove on West Cracroft Island near the... more

by Robert Bales

Title

Floating Cabin

Artist

Robert Bales

Medium

Photograph - Photo

Description

Potts Lagoon is a still surviving, although not exactly thriving float home community, anchored in a narrow cove on West Cracroft Island near the outlet of a lagoon. Named after Murray Clarke Potts, an Ontario student of practical science who came west, married, and staked a claim here in 1908, the cove is around the corner from what was, when Potts arrived, a still active First Nations� burial ground on Klaoitsis Island.
Potts felled timber, built float houses and farmed the land near the lagoon; after World War II, he was appointed Indian Agent in Alert Bay, a community that remains the cultural center of Kwakwala speaking groups today, (the Kwakwakawakw, formerly known in ethnographic literature as the Kwakiutl).
Potts Lagoon was the first place we saw clusters of float homes linked by logboomed sidewalks; it was also the first place where we experienced-perhaps as a consequence of what seemed endless darkness and drizzle�a sense of the aura of loneliness and depression that has accompanied the emptying of once vibrant First Nations and settler communities and businesses all along these shores. Once upon a time, not so long ago early in the 20th century more people lived in several of the small coves north of Desolation Sound than in all of Vancouver. Even in the 1930s, Francis Barrow, an amateur photographer, filmmaker and archeologist who sketched and collected a number of First Nations artifacts, would write in his journals about friends running over to Potts Lagoon for a party. No more or, at least not a party of that sort.

Uploaded

February 20th, 2013