Riley Dorman already knows the river he will return to.
At 18, and about to graduate from GidGalang Ḵ̱uuyas Naay Secondary, Dorman has just won a full scholarship to Simon Fraser University (SFU).
Awarded to one Haida Gwaii high school graduate most years since 2001 by the Scholarship Foundation of the Pacific, it offers $80,000 for a full, four-year undergraduate degree, plus $1,000 per year for travel home to Haida Gwaii.
Dorman’s plan is to earn a degree in science, become a teacher, and return home to teach elementary school.
“I really like Sandspit,” Dorman says first thing.
“And it’s something that I can do in Sandspit, which is probably the biggest reason why I want to do it.”
Dorman is a strong student, with the third-highest marks in a “ridiculous” graduating class.
“I have super smart people in my grade,” he said.
Dorman also works hard. At 12, he started dishwashing at the Sandspit Inn, then picked up odd jobs at the Willows Golf course when the Inn closed.
Since starting two years ago, he has worked at the K’il Kun Xidgwangs Daanaay, the Sandspit airport, first at the Visitor Information Centre and lately as a baggage handler.
But when it comes to volunteering, Dorman is off the charts.
Dorman is a Sandspit volunteer firefighter and a Master Corporal of the Sandspit Junior Canadian Rangers. Under the wing of Sandspit pilot Peter Grundmann, he has also volunteered to be a spotter on search-and-rescue flights.
It was while leading a Junior Canadian Rangers patrol in the mountains of Strathcona Provincial Park that Dorman first thought he might like to be a teacher, something he also got from his mom, Claire Gauthier, who teaches Strong Start to pre-kindergarten kids
It was thanks to Peter Grundmann that Dorman started his favourite volunteer activity—raising salmon from eggs to fry at the hatchery near Alliford Bay.
Some people use tweezers, but Dorman prefers to bare hands to pick out the healthiest of the newly fertilized eggs at the hatchery, which is very fragile at that stage.
“The worst part is at this time, the water is five degrees, and it’s freezing, sitting there for three hours with your hands in the water.”
Once the eggs start hatching, Dorman said there are fewer and fewer dead ones to pick out each visit until finally, all the fry gets weighed, counted, and released to nearby creeks such as Haans, Sachs, and Baxter. The hatchery releases between 10,000 and 40,000 fry every year.
Dorman likes the idea of gathering fish eggs, raising the strong ones, releasing them into the wild, and repeating the process.
“I kind of felt like they were my fish, in a way,” he said.
A young fry himself, Dorman knows that he will face a big change when he moves from the 300-person Sandspit to study at SFU.
SFU has over 37,000 students. Burnaby, home to the main SFU campus, has over 250,000 people. Burnaby is in the Lower Mainland, with a population of 3 million.
But Dorman has visited the mountain-top campus twice already and feels it’s a good fit.
“You can go to the dentist, you can go to the bank, all without leaving the mountain,” he said.
“Which is awesome because I don’t know how much I actually want to go down into Burnaby.”