Aboriginal Tourism - The New Exotic in Canada
    
Fabulous costumes with flowing headdresses, intricate bead and feather work; captivating songs and creative dances; stories filled with ancient wisdom, and complex inspired artwork ...that's exotic and that is Aboriginal culture in British Columbia. Set between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia is a land of infinite topographical diversity and a temperate climate. There are mountains, beaches, moss-carpeted rainforests, lakes, plains and even a dessert. Visitors are amazed and truly welcome. 


Embedded within aboriginal culture is an extraordinary sense of hospitality and a desire to share their traditions and cultures with visitors. Throughout the province there are enriching introductions to First Nations culture through native guided visits to cultural sites and ancient villages, interpretive nature walks through old growth forests, and visits to ancient archaeological sites. There are also cultural cruises, walks to learn about the medicinal use of plants found in the forest, or opportunities to get up close and personal with whales and other wildlife.
 
 The native people of British Columbia are as diverse as the vast beautiful landscape they live in. Some tribes used animal hides or reed mats for covering their lodges while others built with massive timbers and cedar planking, dug pit houses or camped in rock shelters they decorated with pictographs. Clothing could be plain buckskin with ornate fringes, heavily beaded, knitted wool or made from cedar. Many developed elaborate art forms and everything from cooking pots and ceremonial regalia, to totem poles and burial boxes became an artist's canvass.

In British Columbia visitors can watch native artists carve a totem pole, explore traditional lands and waters with an Aboriginal guide and experience a First Nations healing and purification lodge with a native elder. Exquisite Pacific Northwest native art is on view and for sale in art galleries, cultural centers and museums. There are traditional foods and award-winning wines to sample, native-owned resorts, campgrounds, log cabins and bed & breakfast inns to relax in and even golf to enjoy on a native-owned championship golf course!
 
Spending time with the indigenous people of British Columbia will change the way visitors view native culture, art and nature itself. For more information on the array of Aboriginal cultural and nature experiences available in British Columbia, visit www.aboriginalbc.com