Culture

The Pacheedaht people share deep kinship, language, and cultural ties with neighboring First Nations on southern Vancouver Island, including the Ditidaht and the Makah across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We celebrate our traditional practices, including hunting, fishing, smudging, beading, sewing, cedar work, and talking circles, by engaging in these activities and teaching them to our youth. Our elders hold our sacred ways of knowing, seeing, being, and doing.

As whaling people, the Pacheedaht have a profound connection to the ocean, with traditions of hunting whales that date back centuries. Our culture is rich with practices that harmonized with the rhythms of the land and sea.

Today, we actively engage in cultural resurgence programs, allowing for the sharing of knowledge and language. Our community members participate in traditional ceremonies to revive and maintain our cultural practices. Through these efforts, we ensure that our arts, customs, and traditions continue to thrive, reflecting the spirit and resilience of the Pacheedaht people.

The Pacheedaht have many relatives and friends amongst neighboring communities—in fact, according to traditional history, long ago Pacheedaht and Ditidaht ancestors lived together as one tribe at an origin village located on the river whose native name is Diitiida. If you look for the name Diitiida on a map today, you won't find it, as most of the Pacheedaht names for our land have been replaced by English place names.

The river the Pacheedaht call Diitiida is marked as "Jordan River" on modern maps. The Ditidaht First Nation get their name from the village shared at Jordan River. Ditidaht means "People of Diitiida," or people of Jordan River. During the great flood, some of the people living at Diitiida managed to survive by fleeing in a canoe that they anchored to the top of a high mountain in order to escape the rising waters. Afterwards some of the survivors settled at Whyac Village at the outlet of Nitinat Lake into the Pacific Ocean, and became the ancestors of the people who today form the Ditidaht First Nation.

Others amongst the flood survivors returned to the village at Diitiida (Jordan River) and settled once again in their home territory. Eventually, this branch of the peoples from Diitiida became centred on a village at the head of Port San Juan at the mouth of the San Juan River, called p'a:chi:da. This is also the native name for the San Juan River.