Canada Residential School: More Unmarked Graves

VICTORIA—The chilly ocean channel between Vancouver Island and Penelakut Island has seen more than its share of death.

As far back as 1863, the island village with roughly 400 Penelakut residents was the site of a battle in the fighting that led to the British declaring a colonial government in B.C.



And it was to these same waters that two young sisters with a small boat took in 1959, as they attempted to escape another colonial legacy: Canada’s residential school system in the form of the Kuper Island School that then stood on the island.

It’s believed Beverly and Patricia Marilyn Joseph died in their attempt. The body of Patricia Marilyn, 14, was found washed ashore 10 kilometres from the school; the body of Beverly, 12, was not found.

The girls’ names are among 120 listed on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation memorial site as students who died while at Kuper Island School, which was operated by the Catholic Church until 1969 and closed by the government of Canada in 1975. The site collects the names of all the residential school students known to have died while attending the institutions.

Now the Penelakut Tribe has told surrounding First Nations that it has found the unmarked graves of 160 or more people on the grounds of the former residential school, adding to a tragic tally across the country and slowly painting a more complete picture of the deaths that occurred as children were forcibly removed from their home communities and made to live in these institutions.

“We understand that many of our brothers and sisters from our neighbouring communities attended the Kuper Island Industrial School,” reads a letter sent by Penelakut Tribe Chief Joan Brown to neighbouring communities. “We also recognize with a tremendous amount of grief and loss, that too many did not return home.”



The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports initially confirmed the deaths of 3,201 children in the residential school system. That number was already high, indicating a mortality rate for residential schoolchildren at least twice that of the general population before 1950. There have been 980 more names added since the initial report.

Recent searches using ground-penetrating radar in the western communities of Kamloops, Marieval and Cranbrook are showing the actual number may be much higher still.

The TRC records show the names of 120 children who are known to have died at the residential school at Penelakut Island.

By comparison, the TRC had identified the names of 51 students who died at the Kamloops Residential School, before the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced in May that 215 unmarked graves have been found at the site.

Outbreaks of deadly disease were a persistent issue at the Kuper Island School. Typhoid, influenza, and smallpox outbreaks hit the school. Students also did not receive enough to eat, according to school inspectors.

In 1921, a federal government employee found that students with tuberculosis were sleeping in the same dormitories as healthy students at Kuper Island School.

The next year, a different employee wrote that the Indigenous people were “inclined to boycott this school on account of so many deaths.”

Sexual abuse and suicides by students have also been recorded there.

In 1939, an attempted escape drew attention to abuse.

Six boys escaped from the school by canoe and two, who were interviewed by police officers, said they had fled because of “unnatural acts” one of the priests had tried with them. One of the boys gave details of sexual assaults by the priest, which were included in the TRC report. The parents of both boys refused to let them return to school, and an investigation at the school followed (with the alleged perpetrators of abuse having been sent away from B.C. before the investigation concluded).

Today, the island represents the majority of the land of the Penelakut Tribe reserve, with about 300 people living there. It doesn’t have any stores, and is connected to Chemainus, B.C., by ferry.

Archaeological research there began in 2014 as part of the TRC’s work on missing children. After the TRC reports were completed, a team at the University of British Columbia continued the work of collecting records, interviewing people who live in the village and searching the grounds of the former school using ground-penetrating radar.

It’s complicated work, said Eric Simons, a PhD student who works with the Penelakut Tribe on the research, in part because the land where the former school sits is now at the heart of the present village.

“The goal of the archeology is not to enumerate (the graves) so much as it is to locate them on the land so that they can be cared for,” Simons said. “It will probably carry on for many years.”

Simons said the school itself was a large building with multiple outhouses, and that it took up a large portion of the island. Indigenous children from up and down the B.C. coast were sent there, and its remote location earned it the nickname of “Canada’s Alcatraz.”

Before B.C. became a province, the Penelakut people on the island were attacked by British forces in a deadly naval battle.

“It’s an island with a very long contested history with colonial forces,” Simons said. “This is one chapter.”