Bella Bella Central Coast Regional District, British Columbia
Post Office - A Canada Post designation; the post office name may or may not be the same as the name of the place where it is located. At Shearwater (locality), N side of Denny Island, Range 3 Coast Land District
Mapped Location
Bella Bella: The mapped location is an approximation and should not be used for navigation or wayfinding.
Information
General information on Bella Bella
- Feature Type: Place
Official, historical, colloquial and alternative toponyms for Bella Bella
A brief list of names that this geographic feature has been named
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Bella Bella | Official |
Origin Notes and History of Bella Bella
References to Bella Bella that document the origin of its place name
Bella Bella Post Office was opened on the northwest side of Denny Island 1 September 1884, and closed in this location 14 April 1920. Bella Bella Post Office was re-opened 1 September 1920, located across Lama Passage on the east side of Campbell Island at the settlement of New Bella Bella. Bella Bella Post Office moved back to the northwest side of Denny Island (possibly at the same time that Campbell Island Post Office was opened on L1105, 1 October 1936?). Bella Bella Post Office continued to operate for many years out of the BC Packers building, Lot 181, at the northwest side of Denny Island, according to March 1970 advice from postmaster. By 1988 the Bella Bella Post Office had been relocated from Lot 181 eastward about 1 mile to the settlement at Shearwater.
A Selected Bibliography of Bella Bella, Central Coast Regional District, British Columbia
A compilation of essential readings detailing the history, geography, and culture of the region.
Bella Bella texts by Franz Boas
Published in 1928 by Franz Boas, the foundational architect of modern American anthropology, Bella Bella Texts is a dense, bilingual ethnographic repository preserving the oral literature of the Heiltsuk (historically referred to by colonists as the Bella Bella) people of the central coast of British Columbia. Relying on Indigenous informants, Boas systematically transcribed creation histories, family crest narratives, and shamanistic lore into rigorous phonetic notation alongside literal English translations. The volume reflects Boas’s massive, career-long mandate of "salvage anthropology"—a scientifically urgent rush to document the complex Indigenous societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast before their anticipated erasure under the intense pressures of Canadian assimilation policies, residential schools, and the strict federal prohibition of the potlatch.
A keen insight drawn from the work is how the supposedly objective methodology of anthropological transcription actively divorced Indigenous oral traditions from their inherent legal and territorial authority. In Heiltsuk society, these narratives were not mere "folklore" or public entertainment; they were highly guarded intellectual property that codified family lineages, governed resource rights, and asserted territorial sovereignty. By extracting these sacred histories, stripping them of their performative and ceremonial contexts, and flattening them into standardized, bilingual data points for Western academic consumption, Boas’s project subtly disarmed them. The text inadvertently functioned as a mechanism of colonial containment, transforming active, legally binding Indigenous constitutional frameworks into static, depoliticized scientific specimens housed safely within the American academic archive.
ix, 291 ; 24 cm
ONLINE Circulation [ 1 ]
Central Coast Regional District
- Atnarko
- Bella Bella
- Bella Coola
- Boswell
- Brunswick
- Campbell Island
- Dawsons Landing
- Duncanby Landing
- Firvale
- Good Hope
- Goose Bay
- Hagensborg
- Kilbella Bay
- Kimsquit
- Margaret Bay
- Nalos Landing
- Namu
- Ocean Falls
- Old Bella Bella
- Oweekeno
- Rivers Inlet
- Shearwater
- South Bentinck
- Stuie
- Tallheo
- Wadhams
- Waglisla
Political Boundaries
Last updated: 2023-09-26