The Reserve Under the Beach: Sen̓áḵw and Kitsilano
Kitsilano Beach is the recreation face of a Squamish reserve. The sand, the heated pool, and the volleyball courts sit on and beside Kitsilano Indian Reserve No. 6, the village the Squamish call Sen̓áḵw, and the story of the beach is really the story of how that reserve was taken and, a century later, partly recovered.
The village and the name
The Squamish name for the beach itself is X̱epx̱páy̓em, "having red cedar." The wider flats to the east, at the mouth of False Creek where the Burrard Street Bridge now lands, were Sen̓áḵw. In 1877 the Joint Indian Reserve Commission set aside about 80 acres there as Kitsilano Indian Reserve No. 6, formalising a village of roughly twenty families on some of the most valuable undeveloped waterfront in the young city.
The name Vancouver uses is taken from the people it displaced. "Kitsilano" is an anglicization of X̱ats'alanexw, the name of the Squamish chief August Jack Khatsahlano (1877–1971). Around 1905 the Canadian Pacific Railway, subdividing the uplands it had been granted, adopted the spelling to market its new district. The railway kept the chief's name and helped remove the people who bore it.
Two clearances
The Squamish were not the only people pushed off this shore, but theirs was the larger removal. First came the settler Sam Greer, who pre-empted 160 acres in 1882 and gave the sand its early name, Greer's Beach. When the province granted the land to the CPR, Greer refused to go; in September 1891 he shot a deputy sheriff sent to evict him, was convicted of assault causing bodily harm, and served 27 months of hard labour while his house was pulled down. His stand survives in local lore.
The Squamish eviction is remembered far less. In 1913 the provincial government, through its attorney general, arranged a surrender of the reserve that federal law did not permit, because the Indian Act barred selling reserve land without proper authorisation. Eighteen Squamish men were paid about $11,250 each, $202,500 in all. The residents were given a few days, loaded onto a barge, and taken to reserves on the North Shore and in Howe Sound. The houses they left behind were burned. The Vancouver Harbour Commission expropriated more of the site in 1916, and by 1946 the reserve had been erased from the map.
The return
The Squamish never let the claim die. The nation sued Canada in 1977 over the mishandling of the reserve. In 2000 its members voted to accept a $92.5-million federal settlement that, confirmed through the courts in 2002, restored 11.7 acres of the original reserve. The nation marked the homecoming by paddling 28 canoes back to the shore. What had been an erased reserve was, legally, a reserve again.
In 2019 Squamish members voted to build on it. Sen̓áḵw, under construction since September 2022, is eleven towers and roughly 6,000 rental homes on the restored land at the foot of the Burrard Bridge, financed in part by a $1.4-billion federal loan and described by the nation as the largest Indigenous-led housing development in Canadian history. Because the land is a federal reserve, it lies outside City of Vancouver zoning, which is why it can be built far denser than the low-rise neighbourhood around it. The founding developer, Westbank, sold its stake to the pension manager OPTrust in 2025.
Watching from the sand
The pool and the beach carried on through all of it. Kitsilano Pool, opened in 1931 and heated since 1979, runs 137 metres and is the longest outdoor pool in North America; the free Showboat stage has performed beside it since 1935. For most of that time the beach's origin went unmarked, a popular swimming spot with no sign of the village beneath it.
That is what makes this shore worth a page. It is not the mountain view or the saltwater pool. It is that you can stand on Vancouver's busiest swimming beach and watch a nation rebuild the village the city burned, on the same ground, at the same time.
Back to the full Kitsilano Beach guide.