Oowekyala

The Oowekyala, who call themselves Wuikinuxv, meaning the Backbone people, are an Indigenous people of the central coast of British Columbia, holding the shores of Rivers Inlet and Owikeno Lake. Their principal villages stood on the Wannock River linking the lake to the sea. Their Oowekyala tongue is a Northern Wakashan language, so close to Heiltsuk that the two are treated as dialects of one Heiltsuk–Oowekyala language.

The Oowekyala lived on salmon runs, sea mammal hunting and gathering, built villages of cedar plank houses, and organized society around the potlatch. Together with the Heiltsuk and Haisla they were once loosely labelled the Northern Kwakiutl, a name later rejected as inaccurate.

When European maritime fur traders reached the central coast in the 1790s, the Oowekyala were drawn into the fiercer raiding and introduced diseases of the fur-trade era.