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travel / travel magazine / summer 2007
Island Getaways
Song of Sointula
Malcolm Island is a place of peace, where orcas dance, dreamers roam and a group of hardy
Finns once sought the promised land
By Tom Hawthorn
PARADISE GOES BY MANY NAMES. Eden. Heaven. Shangri-La. A century
ago, some hardy Finnish pioneers looked on a small forested
island off the rugged northeast coast of Vancouver Island and
decided they had found their utopia. They created a socialist commune
with a sawmill, a foundry, a brickyard and a blacksmith's shop
and named it Sointula, Finnish for "place of harmony."
How the name must have mocked them. They began their
experiment with too many farmers and writers and not enough
loggers and fishermen. A series of disasters, including a fatal fire,
led to the collapse of the commune, and a few of the settlers left
for the Fraser Valley on the British Columbia mainland. Those
who stayed behind formed co-ops and unions, the better to
enjoy the benefits of the fish they caught.
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But the Finns were neither the first nor the last to
discover this place. Nomadic Kwakiutl often stopped
here to fish, collect clams and pick berries, and the 200-
hectare Kwakiutl Reserve shares the Pulteney Point
region. In the 1960s, free spirits and draft dodgers
made their way here, buying up old farms. A handful
of those farms can be found a short drive from the village.
Beaches offer scenic views so typical of the coast.
Malcolm Island remains a mostly unspoiled landscape
— with cedar, spruce, hemlock and balsam
forests covering almost all of its 83 square kilometres.
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