Front Burner - Front Burner Introduces: Kuper Island

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Kuper Island is an 8-part series that tells the stories of four students: three who survived and one who didn’t. They attended one of Canada’s most notorious residential schools – where unsolved deaths, abuse, and lies haunt the community and the survivors to this day. Hosted by Duncan McCue. More episodes are available at hyperurl.co/kuperisland

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, we have a very special bonus for Frontburner's podcast subscribers. It's the first episode of a brand new series from CBC Podcasts called Cooper Island. After the Cooper Island residential school was torn down, the survivors are still haunted by what happened there. Longtime CBC reporter,

radio host, and investigative journalist Duncan McHugh exposes buried police investigations, confronts perpetrators of abuse, and witnesses a community trying to rebuild, literally on top of the old school's ruins and the unmarked graves of Indigenous children. We've got the first episode of Cuper Island. Have a listen. Before we start, this is a podcast about Canada's Indian residential schools, and it contains descriptions of sexual violence, suicide, and abuse. If you need support, you can find information about where to turn for help at cbc.ca slash keeperisland. Bonjour. Encore dans l'indigène casse. Anishinaabe d'abajamo in Dao.

I'm Duncan McHugh. I'm a journalist, an Indigenous journalist. I'm doing a podcast about Indian residential schools. And if Canada had had its way, I wouldn't be here. Because the whole point of creating a network of church-run, state-funded boarding schools that operated for over a century in Canada was to get rid of people like me. To eradicate, assimilate, kill the Indian in the child. But I'm here. My ancestors went through a lot to get me here. So, let me tell you a story.

It's good to be here finally. Oh, yeah. I was wondering if you were going to make it. I kept looking at the time and I was thinking, oh, maybe they're lost. We were kind of running on Indian time. Oh, no, no such thing. It starts for me in the driveway of Jill Harris.

I've heard a lot of stories about residential schools over the years, but she told me one over the phone that made the hairs on my neck stand up. Well, come on in. Thank you. Thank you. Miigwech. She's a short native grandma with long silvering hair. How many cats do you have?

Probably about 10 or 11 in the house. 10 or 11 cats. I'll try to pretend that I'm not allergic to cats. Oh, are you? I am. That's okay. Look at them. They're lying all over the place. Jill is the former chief of Penelaket, a Hul'q'amina community on an isolated island off the coast of British Columbia.

It's where the Cooper Island Residential School once stood. So just to give you a little bit of background on what I'm doing with the residential school search. Yeah, tell me. We sit down at our kitchen table. The residential school search for missing children is... We sit down at our kitchen table, and then Jill starts to tell me about a day when she was chief, like 20 years ago, when an elder came to see her at the band office. She was very concerned that there were people being bothered

by, like, apparitions of children or hearing children or being haunted sort of by the children. She was afraid that there was somebody who was going to be hurt or we were going to have trouble. She said we needed to do some work. We needed to find out why the children were appearing to people or why they were calling for help.

What went through your head when she came to you? Well, I believe in what she was talking about, like ghosts. That little laugh there, I think it's because ghosts isn't the perfect word for what Jill's describing. To people at Penelaket, the spirits of the dead are powerful. You don't mess with them. And they started bothering people not long after the Cooper Island School closed in 1975. they started bothering people not long after the Cooper Island School closed in 1975.

We had demolished the school and were beginning to do some development around there. So my thought was they were afraid. And so they were reaching out because some people were saying that they could feel like being touched, like physically touched. Touched on their shoulder. They could sense that there were like appearances, children looking in their windows, the windows of the houses, children looking in their windows, the windows of the houses, and people could hear crying and some, like, hollering,

and there was also some laughter, but mainly it was that anguish, I guess, of the spirits. Did you think it was haunted? I think there was a disturbance. It's not so much a haunting as a presence. You know, they were scared. We needed to let them know that we were here to help them. If you're Indigenous, I don't need to tell you how Cooper Island and all the other residential schools were like bombs in our families.

This podcast bears witness to a lot of the stuff you've lived, maybe in silence. And trust me, we're going to name some names. For those of you who aren't Indigenous, even if you think you know how bad it was, you may have only heard a sanitized version of events. But recently, the buried truths of residential schools got a lot harder to ignore. There's been yet another discovery of unmarked graves at a former residential school in B.C. Neighboring First Nations communities found out about the grim discovery in a newsletter posted online on Monday morning. The Penelakut tribe says it has found

more than 160 unmarked graves in an area near the former Cooper Island. This is a story about a so-called school that is so notorious it's been called Canada's Alcatraz. It's about three children who survived and one boy who didn't. It's about families trying to heal and a community that says it's time everyone knows what really happened at Cooper Island. It's like a Stephen King book. It's like a bad dream that will never go away. I have never seen such abject fear as what I saw in that child. And I have never seen such abject evil as what was in that man.

Psychopaths and sociopaths raise children in a confined space. And that has everything to do with why children are missing and murdered. The clandestine burials are clandestine for a reason. People who do the burying don't want anybody else to know about them. This is Cuper Island. Episode 1. A school they called Alcatraz. I'm winding down the Vancouver Island Highway with my producer, Jody Martinson.

We should be coming up to it very shortly here. A little zigzag and then on our left. Okay. Wow. Good morning, Sailor C. The sunrise is really lovely. So we're trying to find the ferry terminal here. I lived in BC for years, but the largeness of everything here still blows me away.

Think towering cedar trees and orca whales. These are the traditional lands of the Penelaket tribe, part of a larger group known as the Hul'q'aminim, or Coast Salish peoples. Morning. Morning. Two for Penelaket. Okay. How long does it take to get over?

About an hour. Penelaketh is a Hul'q'amenim word. It was the original name for the island. But then British settlers renamed it after a naval officer, Captain Cooper. Then in 1889, they plunked a school down in the middle of the island, named after the same guy. Generations of Hul'q'amenim children were forced to go there. after the same guy. Generations of Hul'q'u'minim children were forced to go there.

Those kids made their way through the choppy waters of the Salish Sea like we're doing now, but they huddled in a tiny boat, probably crying for their parents, not knowing where they were going or for how long. A lot of them never came home. Who died? How did they die? Where are they buried? And why have their graves gone unmarked for so long?

The Canadian government and the Catholic Church have never properly answered those questions. As we roll off the ferry, the high school kids are lined up, waiting to leave the island. It's like a walk up the hill, waving at everybody you know in the waiting to leave the island. It's like a walk up the hill waving at everybody you know in the lineup to leave the island. Except for us. They even waved at us. After all, teenagers. The obligatory teenage hoodie.

Island life. It's waving in the lineup at each other. Everybody's smiling as they're getting on the ferry. The other ones are getting off. Whoever is in front of us is very popular. I spot the fellow we've come to see walking off the ferry. Raymond Tony Charlie. He goes by Tony.

Jody hops out to walk up the hill with him. It's a pretty typical rainy day. It is. But I know the river is real low right now. The salmon are going to come up pretty soon, so we need the rain. Yeah, I caught that fairy for 27 years. Come to work every day. Yeah, I caught that fairy for 27 years.

Come to work every day. Tony was the social services manager for the Penelope tribe. He's retired now and in his early 70s. He's a survivor of the Cooper Island School and a little wobbly on his feet. At the top of the hill, we meet up with Tony's younger brother, James, also a survivor. He's standing by a beat-up F-150 truck. Is this your truck? Yeah, it's an old wood truck.

STR. I like the engine. I had a 350 in a Chevy Silverado. Yeah. That was hard gas compared to this engine. James is kind of a man's man. His home is just a few minutes' drive from where we're standing, on the other side of the island. Because he lives here, the school grounds are simultaneously no big deal and a minefield of childhood memories.

You pass it so many times, and you cover it up. You pass it so many times, and you cover it up. It's just like a scar. That skin grew over to heal that wound. A scar is there, but that scar takes place of the injury. The community tore the school building to pieces in 1980, then burned it to the ground. But James and Tony have agreed to show me around the old site.

I don't know if those steps are still here yet. Are they concrete steps? Oh, wow. They're not concrete yet. Yeah, there's still some steps here, right here from the residential school. Wow. So this is, these are the steps to go up to the school? Straight up to the front, yeah.

The cement stairs are now overgrown with moss, but they lead to a long wooden wharf that still runs out to the sea. This is where the boats used to unload hundreds and hundreds of children from Hul'q'u'minim communities up and down the coast. I remember coming off the ramp, walking off on the ramp down and up to the ferry, and ferry was very, very different. We had to get off the ferry and we walked up the steps here. Right at the top would have been the entrance. But I was looking at this big red brick building, eh? And I was just saying, ah, what the heck is this ugly building doing here right in the middle of nowhere?

Because it's the only kind of building you see in the city. At the time, we didn't know what we were getting into. We didn't know what was in store for us. We didn't have a clue. They were looking at a Gothic cathedral-like institution. It was three stories tall, and it had a bell tower and a large white cross. It was always manicured. The lawns were always mowed and all the hedges were all trimmed. It was a beautiful looking place, but looks don't mean nothing. The flowering azaleas, fruit trees,

and man-made ponds were an attempt to impose order on what settlers considered an unruly wilderness. But the facade was hiding all kinds of ugliness. So just on the right there is where that incinerator was. It was basically a fuel tank. They cut it in half and they utilized that part for burning all the cardboard and the wood refuse from the school. I had one of my friends brought me here when I started day school, showed me the steel drum that was here, the incinerator. And he was saying, this is where they burn all the little children, the little babies that are born.

They were thrown into the incinerator, and they were burnt there. Are those stories that you had heard as well, James? Oh, yeah. I guess the nuns were quite experienced at recognizing the signs of pregnancy and whatever, and they would have the child aborted and disposed of in a very unhealthy manner. Yeah. I was very young, but I was just in awe. Like, you know, it's just unbelievable to hear

because who would do that to a baby? So that always stays in my mind because of the way he told me me his body language and his voice. You know, because the voice was real, the expression, all the words were real. And it's a fact and it's something that he, and something that he wanted to share with me. But it's so hard to believe, you know, anybody can do that to a little baby. I think that's pretty difficult to prove. That's one of the things is, it seems like we always will hear the stories.

Even today we'll hear stories from other survivors. And I hear them about what happened to them or what they were involved in. They've whispered these horrific stories to each other for years. Survivors from other schools told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission the same thing. About fetuses and babies thrown into furnaces. You said, I mean, that's a really disturbing story. It is, but it's a true fact of life for the Regents of Schools, the Catholic school that lives on this island.

It's a true story. It's not a fabricated story. It's not a made-up story. It's not a hearsay story. It is a truth. You kind of just acknowledged that. You were like proving it might be hard. Part of it is the way of our people is

it's a vocal history that we always have learned from because the words were shared over and over and over. It seems like they were repeated, but that becomes implanted in your mind, it becomes implanted in you, so. We keep walking, past a line of gangly and twisted apple trees, remnants of the old orchards that once spread out all around the school. We stop in front of a couple of new houses.

Yeah, there was a fence along here, along the field here. Well, when I was walking with him, he stopped here and he pointed me to the tree that was here, old apple tree. They were great big apples. And he said, well, this is where they put some of the babies underground. They were buried here under the tree. And that's what he told me, you know. Buried under the tree, the apple tree. So, still very difficult. I can't imagine what it would be like for a child to hear that kind of thing.

His stories would be dismissed as hearsay in journalism or law. But these secrets shared between children seem too evil for children to imagine, and the stories persist, pass down generations, truths that refuse to stay buried. I'm going to go. can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. As we walk along, I can't get over how much community life in the here and now happens

on top of the old site of the Cooper Island Residential School. For survivors, potential triggers lie in every direction. This road was not here when we were going to school here. What we're standing on right now was the school grounds. Yeah. So this road is new. It's a new road. Okay. Community members line up for the ferry here. There are new buildings everywhere. An adult ed center, a daycare, a longhouse where they meet for ceremonies, all built where the old school

used to be. I mean, the community has now grown up around the site, right? What's it like for you to walk through here? To me, it's very disturbing. It's a very disturbing thing. All the atrocities, the hurt, the sorrows that was in this ground, eh?

There's got to be some good, healthy spirits brought back to these lands because these lands all hold a lot of pain right now. They hold a lot of bad memories. Back when James was the tribe's health director, there were two rooms in the health center that were perpetually cold. Didn't matter how high they turned up the thermostat. The two rooms there, there were always weird things going on and the people would get chilled and those two rooms would never heat up.

The band called in technicians to check the vents. Everything seemed okay. They analyzed the walls with radar guns. Nothing. No one could explain why it was always so chilly. Here's what James and everyone else knew, though. Those two rooms were built on top of what used to be the girls' side of the school. Why didn't it heat going in that room?

It's unexplained. The doctors and nurses that we had in them always felt a presence in there. Kind of weird things always happened in those rooms. Little things dropping off the counter and onto the floor. So we always lived with those things, eh? Before they called it a sensation, they would call it an experience.

But they still won't come out and say, a ghost being. The Western world never talks like that, eh? James is struggling to describe these ghosts, just like Jill Harris, the former chief, was. Jill said haunted isn't the right word to explain the restlessness of the spirits. But Penelicate residents weren't the only ones feeling unsettled by it all. Jill said every winter, invites would go out calling Hul'q'u'minim people from far and wide to the ceremonial dances. But lots of them wouldn't come.

Because to get to the longhouse where the dances are held, you have to pass by where the residential school used to stand. Well, people knew why people were not accepting the invitation. They had such bad memories about what happened there. So people just kind of understood that they were, why they weren't coming to accept an invitation to a big dance. Because even though you'd torn the building down, the school was still part of the landscape. The school was still part of the landscape. There school was still part of the landscape. There was stuff still buried under the ground

that was a part of the school. Their memory was so strong about what had happened there that it was still real. Why did they keep building there then? Jill says they didn't have a choice. The community was growing and needed housing. The government, specifically the Department of Indian Affairs, gave them no alternative but to develop the old school grounds.

There is more land where the development could happen, but it's just like when you're talking to Indian Affairs There is more land where the development could happen, but it's just like when you're talking to Indian Affairs and they're saying there's already water there, there's already, you know, it's already been... Cleared. Cleared there, so that's the best place to have it. So that's where housing development took place. Penelaket was trying its best to move forward.

But how could they when the landscape was littered with such awful memories? So a long time before anyone else was really paying attention to hidden graves at residential schools, the community took matters into its own hands and turned to technology. And there was a maple tree there in the corner of the girl's side and that's where they found one of the babies born that was buried there when they're doing the ground scanning. Ground penetrating radar. Penelaket started to work with a team of archaeologists about eight years ago. They wanted to dig foundations without team of archaeologists about eight years ago. They wanted to dig foundations without worrying about disturbing unmarked burials.

And they wanted to piece together what happened to the children who never made it home. When the radar started locating graves, some marked, some not, it brought all the pain back up to the surface of how the school had devastated families. Well, just over here on the right, just where the little trees are, just back that way about 50 feet where this sign is, is that they had that, they call that wire mesh. And it was around the whole school grounds.

And a lot of the people, when they came to the island, they weren't allowed to go inside there to see their children, eh? For James and Tony, the Cooper Island School was a generational curse. Their mother was sent there in the 1930s. James, Tony, and four of their brothers and sisters in the 1960s. They weren't allowed to care for each other or bond. No, we never saw them at all. All our activities were separate from each other, our schedules, so we never would join.

Just that movie night once in a while, every two, three months you'd have a movie, eh? so we never would join. Just that movie night once in a while, every two, three months you'd have a movie, eh? They kept us separate. They did a damn good job of separating us, family. And even brothers that lived, that were in the boys' dormitories, they made sure they kept us separated.

You guys weren't that much different in age. You're only, what, two years? Fourteen months, yeah. Fourteen months, but then you hardly saw each other at all. Tony was a senior and I was an intermediate. So when I was on the second floor, Tony was on a different floor for me. Junior boys on the top floor. so those floors did not mingle. They had activities, different times, activities for them.

Why did they do that? That is to destroy family, destroy the unity of a family. That's exactly why Canada's first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, created residential schools, to separate children from their Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, created residential schools. To separate children from their, quote, savage parents. It was an all-out war on Indigenous families. In many ways it worked.

And when their mother was murdered on the streets of Seattle, they ended up orphans. I guess, deep down, I'm not close to my two of my sisters or one of my younger brother. Some of our values and relationships were really broken down good by their residential school, and it's something that I don't know could ever be repaired. You just put your hand on James' back. Yeah. I noticed that.

And despite what you guys went through at the school, you are close. I can see that. But you said you've had to work hard at that. Yeah, because we didn't have parents. We had each other. And they couldn't destroy that, what me and Tony have. What we have is a love and survival. Tony and James survived.

A lot of children didn't. The National Center for Truth and Reconciliation's latest count for the number of children who died at Canada's residential schools is 4,118. And counting. We'll never know much about most of them. We won't know what those kids wanted to be when they grew up. We won't hear about their dreams. But there's one boy who died at Cuper Island who James and Tony and others want us to know about. Their classmate Richard. Partly because he was a really kind and gentle kid. A lot of people told us that. But they also can't forget him because the way he died was so disturbing.

It marked an entire generation of survivors. Over 50 years later, they still whisper about what they think happened to him. The mystery of his death is one of the big question marks that keeps the community hurting. And where he died is yet one more place community members pass by every day. The gymnasium was here on the left, right here up on this little hill here. It was an old barn they converted into the gymnasium for their school. And that's where the young fella hung himself. They said that he hung himself

because his parents were fighting at home and he wished that he could have a Christian family that would be forever happy. And they said he underlined many passages in the Bible that says how his parents should be, which is totally wrong, a total lie. That's what they told you? Yeah.

Yeah. On upcoming episodes of Cuper Island, we find out more about the day Richard died and why some consider the official story a lie. Richard died and why some consider the official story a lie. Some of the Catholic nuns and brothers took their children up there to view the body. They took kids to see the body? Yes, they had to go up and look at the, yeah.

We meet Richard's sister, Belvi, who can't forget her last phone conversation with her brother. We're just talking, and then all of a sudden he says, you know what, sis, I can't wait to get out of this hellhole. When I get out of here, I'm going to tell everything. And that was the last time we heard from him. And we learn more about what life was really like on the boys' side, and the terrifying secrets the children were forced to keep. You could hear the bed squeaking all over the dormitory, but everybody would pretend they were sleeping.

The next morning, the poor guy could hardly walk, but nobody said nothing because it could be their turn tonight. Cooper Island is produced by Martha Troian and Jody Martinson and hosted by me, Duncan McHugh. Thank you. Theme music by Zibiwan. Art by Elliot Whitehill. Hajka Jimigwetch to the Penelaket Elders Committee, Jill Harris, James and Raymond Tony Charlie, Bobby Sam, Steve Sweetholt, and we raise our hands to Mike Charlie for all his help. He passed away before we got to air.

If you need support, you can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour National Indian Residential School Crisis Line, 1-866-925-4419. Or for more resources on Canada's Indian residential schools, go to our website, cbc.ca slash cupereisland. And if you like this episode, please help others find it by rating and reviewing us. Miigwech bizindayik. Thanks for listening. All right, that was the first episode of Cuper Island. You can listen to more on the CBC Listen app and everywhere you get your podcasts.