Uncover - S16: “Kuper Island” E1: A School They Called Alcatraz

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Duncan McCue travels to Penelakut, an island off the coast of B.C., and the site of the Kuper Island Residential School. The community has torn down the reviled building, but the dark memories of what happened at the nearly-century old institution linger. Survivors James and Tony Charlie give a tour of their old school grounds, and we look into the mystery of what happened to one boy, Richard Thomas, who did not make it out alive. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/kuper-island-transcripts-listen-1.6622551

Canadians care about what's happening in the world and in just 10 minutes, World Report can help you stay on top of it all. Join me, Marcia Young. And me, John Northcott, to get caught up on what was breaking when you went to bed and the stories that still matter in the morning. Our CBC News reporters will tell you about the people trying to make change. The political movements catching fire. And the cultural moments going viral.

Find World Report wherever you get your podcasts. Start your day with us. This is a CBC Podcast. 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 ce 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, sorry. 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'uminum 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 for missing children is, well, I'm working with Andrew. Yeah, tell me. 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 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. 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.

And people could hear crying and some like hollering and there was also some laughter but mainly it was 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 BC. Neighbouring 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. Wow. Good morning, Sailor C. The sunrise is really lovely. So we're trying to find the ferry terminal here. I lived in B.C. 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 Penelakut tribe, part of a larger group known as the Hul'q'uminum or Coast Salish peoples. Morning. Morning. Two for Penelakut. Okay.

How long does it take to get over? Across an hour. Penelakuth is a Hul'q'uminim 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. This is an important safety announcement. All BC Perry crew members are certified by Transport Canada Marine Safety to deal with emergency situations. In the event of an emergency, please stop what you're doing and call the direction. 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? 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 lineup to leave the island. Except for us. They even waved at us. Yeah, after all, teenagers. It's the obligatory teenage hoodie. Island life.

Waving in the lineup at each other. Everybody's smiling as they're getting on the line up 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 ferry for 27 years. Come to work every day. Tony was the social services manager for the Penelakut 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 hardened 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 that up. It's just like a scar. That skin grew over to heal it. 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 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 it 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's 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 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 knew and something that he wanted to share with me so but it's 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 general schools, the Catholic school that knows 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. There was a fence along here, along the field here. 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, eh? 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. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. 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 as new as a new road. Okay. Yeah. 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? the atrocities, the hurt, the sorrows that was in this ground. 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 isn't he going in that room? It's unexplained. of the school. Why isn't he going in the room? It's unexplained. The doctors and nurses that we had 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. They had such bad memories about what happened there. So people just kind of understood 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 was stuff still buried under the ground that was a part of the landscape. The 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 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. Penelakut 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, eh? 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 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 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?

They kept us separate. They did a damn good job of separating us, the family. And even the brothers that lived, the boys born in 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. 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 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 the 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 Centre 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. 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, eh? 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. and why some consider the official story a lie. Some of the Catholic nuns and brothers took the 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, Belvie, 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 pretended they were sleeping. The next morning, the poor guy could hardly walk, but nobody said nothing, because it could be their turn tonight. Cuper Island is produced by Martha Troian and Jody Martinson and hosted by me, Duncan McHugh. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner.

Our coordinating producer is Roshni Nair, mixed by Michael Catano and Lee Rosevere, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Theme music by Zibiwan. Art by Elliot Whitehill. Haichka 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 cooperisland. go to our website, cbc.ca slash cuperisland. And if you liked this episode, please help others find it by rating and reviewing us. Miigwech bizindayik.

Thanks for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.