Stanley Park

The City of Vancouver calls Stanley Park its first and largest park and counts 400 hectares of West Coast rainforest inside it. The City acknowledges that Vancouver sits on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) and the səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). The seawall rings the shore. Inland, the City's list of landmarks takes in Lost Lagoon, Siwash Rock, the Hollow Tree, Beaver Lake and Prospect Point.

The eight totem poles at Brockton Point come from several Nations, most of them far from Coast Salish country. The Park Board bought the first four from Alert Bay on Vancouver Island in the 1920s and stood them at Lumberman's Arch. Poles from Haida Gwaii and from Rivers Inlet on the central coast followed for the city's 1936 Golden Jubilee, and the whole collection moved to Brockton Point in the mid-1960s. Many of the poles you see now are replicas or loaned replacements, since the originals went to museums in the late 1980s and the original Skedans Mortuary Pole went home to Haida Gwaii. The Squamish Nation raised the Rose Cole Yelton Memorial Pole in 2009, and Rose's son Robert Yelton led its carvers. Ellen Neel's Kakaso'las pole went back to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC on 4 September 2024 because of its age.

Coast Salish artist Susan Point created the three red cedar gateways at the Brockton Point Visitor Centre with Coast Salish Arts and the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, and they went in in 2008. Their slant-roof shape follows Coast Salish architecture. Near the Miniature Railway Plaza, Richard Krentz carved Raven: Spirit of Transformation from a Douglas fir stump that the 2006 windstorm left behind.

The train won't run this winter. The City counts at least 500 species in the park, with five breeding pairs of bald eagles and at least one family of coyotes that hunts at night. Keep your food to yourself. Park Board bylaws already banned leaving food anywhere in a park outside a bin, and after months of coyote attacks in Stanley Park the board backed a $500 fine for feeding wildlife in 2021.