June 23, 2025 • 62 mins
Kuper Island is a remarkable podcast, an investigation into one of Canada’s most notorious so called Indian residential schools. Journalist Duncan McCue explores the unsolved death of a student, a tragedy that sheds light on rampant abuse and exposes the trauma of three survivors.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. Why why were
they trying to escape?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
You know? Why would a seven year old or an
eleven year old set out in the ocean in an
open boat in the middle of the winter. It's clear
that the children understood that they didn't want to be there,
and there was a reason why.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists,
(00:58):
filmmakers and podcasters who we have investigated and reported on
notorious true crime cases. This is about the choices writers make,
both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into
the unpublished details behind their stories. Cuper Island is a
remarkable podcast an investigation into one of Canada's most notorious
(01:20):
so called Indian residential schools. Journalists Duncan McHugh explores the
unsolved death of a student, a tragedy that sheds light
on rampant abuse and exposes the trauma of three survivors.
A trigger warning. We talk about suicide in this episode.
When people ask you what the podcast is about in
(01:43):
a the elevator pitch really simple terms here, what do
you say that Cuper Island is about?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
When people ask, I tell them it's about four kids.
I tell them it's about four kids that attended a school,
an Indian residential school. Three of them survived and one didn't.
It is about long, long history in our country. There
were over one hundred residential schools in every province of Canada,
as there were Indian boarding schools in the United States
(02:10):
as well. This is just the story of one boarding school.
But more than that, the Keeper On podcast is about
three children and we did our best, producers Jody Martinson
and Martha Troyan and I, we did our best to
try to explore the lives of those kids when they
were in school and through the eyes of the three
(02:31):
who survived. But it was very much a journey that
we weren't expecting when we started into the life of
one boy who died, Richard Thomas, and trying to find
out how he died and why he died, and that
ended up being an extraordinary, extraordinary journey.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Let's start with how you came into this project, and
once we get through that, then let's set the scene
for where we start the story.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So I have been a reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
the CBC, which is our public broadcaster in Canada, for
over twenty five years, doing television current affairs documentaries about
all issues under the sun. But I'm also in a shnabe.
I am a Jibwa from a small First nation in
southern Ontario, and that has very much informed my work
(03:19):
over the years. I have never exclusively reported on Indigenous issues,
but it's always been important to me to have more
Indigenous voices in our newscasts, and so I have done
reporting on residential schools for literally two decades as a
journalist for the CBC because it is a huge part
(03:39):
of our life in this country. Some people like to
say that it's a dark chapter of Canadian history. To me,
it's the whole story kit. You know, when you start
to learn about the history of Indian residential schools, why
they were created, how the children were treated when they
(03:59):
were at the schools and taken away from their families.
You start to understand so many of the problems and
challenges that First Nations people face now today in Canada.
It all often points back to their treatment in the
residential schools. So I am well familiar being a Nishinabe myself.
(04:22):
I have extended family who went to residential schools, and
certainly I have had friends and lovers and family members
who are impacted by the residential schools. You can't be
an Indigenous person in Canada or the United States for
that matter and not be impacted by residential schools somehow.
So for me it was a personal story, but also
(04:44):
as a journalist, as a reporter, I have spent a
career trying to unpack that story and explain it to
Canadians and why we had, you know, a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in this country specifically to look into residential
schools and the legacy that it has left us as
a country. It became particularly i would say heated though
(05:05):
in twenty twenty one, when one school in particular, the
Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, announced that they
had I would say, uncovered over two hundred on marked graves,
that the fact that children died at residential schools was
not a mystery. It wasn't it wasn't hidden. The Truth
and Reconciliation Commission spent over five years crisscrossing the country
(05:30):
gathering volumes and volumes and volumes of evidence of the
mistreatment of children in the schools, and they clearly stated
that over four thousand children died while attending Indian residential
schools over the course of a century. So it was
not it wasn't a surprise to Indigenous people. We have
(05:53):
been telling those stories amongst our family and to the
media for a long time now, that our children did
not come home from the schools. They were sent off
to be quote educated, and many of them did not
come home. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission put a hard
number on that at well over four thousand children, and
(06:14):
certainly there were even headlines at the time of the
number of deaths of children at residential school but it
didn't seem to really resonate with Canadians until this announcement
in twenty twenty one. Of the unmarked graves that were
found at the Kamlibs Indian residential school and I remember
it so clearly, Kate. I mean, it was sort of
(06:36):
a social media announcement on a late Friday afternoon. My gosh,
like you know, over the weekend, it just seemed that
this it was like a band aid was being ripped
off of a wound that had not had a chance
to scar yet. Because the pain that came out of
(06:56):
that announcement amongst Indigenous people was just visceral. My heart
is getting heavy just telling you about it and remembering
that time. And for some reason, Kate, that I cannot
explain to you, being having been a journalist and covered
this and told Canadians this story. But for some reason,
this announcement in twenty twenty one really struck a chord
(07:19):
with Canadians, and all of a sudden, at residential schools
sites former residential school sites and at Catholic churches, people
were lining up to lay down flowers to put little
children's shoes, you know, And there were these kind of
growing memorials that were happening right across the country over
(07:39):
the course of the week. And then there were a
number of other First Nation communities who announced that they
had former residential schools on their sites where they had
been doing ground penetrating radar work and had also uncovered
on Mark Graves, and so over the course of a month,
I would say there was this announcement after announce after announcement. Again,
(08:02):
none of this is a surprise. It's well documented that
Indigenous children died at the schools, but for some reason,
it just Canadians got it for the first time. These
were small children who were ostensibly being educated, but that
is not what happened. They died, They literally died, and
our families have been trying to deal with that ever since.
(08:25):
So at that time, CBC Podcasts approached me and said,
we think you should, you should take a deeper look
at this, and I said, I'd be happy to. This
is the kind of story that deserves a treatment. And
I had been reporting in British Columbia for a number
of years. I've been based out of Vancouver, BC, and
as I said, I've done lots of plenty of residential
(08:47):
school stories, about the court cases, about sexual abuse, all
kinds of different things. I had heard a lot about
the Keeper Island School being a particularly notorious one. We'll
put it that way. It was It was a place
that the survivors of that school called it Alcatraz because
it was located on an island. The island the indigenous
(09:09):
name of the island is Pennellicate. It is a place
where the hull Caomina people have lived since time out
of mind. The colonizers or the settlers changed the name
to the Keuper Island, and that was the name of
the residential school that was located there. It was about
three I'm going to say three miles roughly from Vancouver Island,
(09:30):
a small island in the middle of the Salish Sea.
I think one of the reasons that it had the
reputation that it did, and certainly why it was called Alcatraz,
was because it was out of side and out of mind,
you know, a place where children from up and down
Vancouver Island were taken and dropped and left at this
school that was run by a Catholic order called the
(09:53):
Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and it operated for over one
hundred years. And as I said, I had heard pretty
awful things about that place. And so when we were
trying to figure out how do we explain this history
of residential schools and and also this phenomenon of the
(10:14):
deaths of children and the unmarked grades. I thought that
perhaps the easiest way to do that might be through
just one school, rather than than trying to to to
encompass this this giant history. Maybe if we just focused
on one school, we might be able to to help
Canadians understand because there there are all kinds of history
(10:34):
books about about residential schools, and there have been movies made,
and it's it's an unpleasant it's an unpleasant aspect of
both Canadian and American history, which serves the countries of
Canada and the United States. It serves them well to
not remember this history because it is it is. As
(10:55):
I say, it's certainly a dark period and a shameful one.
And it's not something that was part of my education
growing up, as in elementary or secondary education. Certainly not
even in my post secondary education. It's not something that
many of us of our age learned about. And so
(11:16):
it was important to us to try to help Canadians
understand through the lens of this one school, this place
that survivors Noah's Alcatraz, what happened there and what life
was like for children who went to that school.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Give me a very brief history of how these Indian
residential schools even came about. Help me understand why this
would be something that Indigenous people would not accept, but
it just it happened, And how can this happen?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
When you look back at a why or how in
Indian residential schools were created, you do have to go
take a peak back into history, and it does take
you back into the eighteen hundreds at a time when
there was an incredible amount of change going on in
both Canada and the United States for indigenous people and
(12:14):
the settlers are moving across the country and defining the
nations that they were about to become. And at that time,
when you look back at the records, you'll see that
my people, the Nishnabek, for example, understood that life was changing,
that there was a new way of looking at the
(12:36):
world and surviving in the world, and that was going
to involve working alongside the newcomers, the white people. That
was part of the purpose of the treaties from an
Aniabk perspective, was having agreements for using the land with
the settlers and the white people. But they also understood
(12:58):
that there were skills that would be helpful to them
in terms of adjusting to a new way of life.
And so early on in the relationship. In the mid
eighteen hundreds, you saw that there were First Nation people,
and again I referred to my own people, to Nishnabe,
who were interested in sending their kids to get the
(13:18):
white man's education. They saw that it could be valuable
to them, and so they quite willingly actually said, yes,
we would like our children to learn the white man's
skills and learn the white man's language. And so the
early residential schools were set up with the agreement of
the First Nation's people that they would share their children
(13:41):
for a short period of time each year, and that's
how they started. But things took a dark turn in
the late eighteen hundreds, around about the time that Canada
became a country. Our first prime minister, his name was
John A. McDonald. He actually looked to the United States.
John A. McDonald had a very different project in mind.
(14:01):
He was trying to clear the west, clear the prairies
and make way for a national railway and settlement of
the pioneers and Indians. Indigenous people stood in the way
of that project. That is quite clear. He made no
bones about that and he felt that the easiest way
(14:23):
to get rid of quote the Indian problem, and that's
how it was referred to, was to separate children from
their families. And so that idea didn't come out of nowhere.
It came out of him sending an emissary down to
the United States and studying the boarding schools that had
been set up with Indian children in the United States.
(14:45):
So the whole idea to separate children from their families,
to blow up Indigenous families, that was what really sparked
the creation of Indian residential school and for cost saving purposes,
it really helped to have a partner in that project,
(15:06):
and that was the churches. The churches saw it as
being an opportunity to have a whole bunch of new
converts and so quite willingly signed up to run the
education of Indian children, financed by the federal government, the
Canadian government, but it was a partnership between state and church.
(15:30):
And so in the late eighteen hundreds we go from
a small handful of schools with First Nations who were
interested in getting a white man's education, to it becoming
the official policy of the Canadian government with regard to
education of Indian children, and there's no bones about it.
It is quite clear in Sir John A. McDonald's writings
(15:53):
and his philosophy that the entire entire aim of that
project was not so much education as it was assimilation.
It was his hope and the hope of his staff
that Indians would disappear, that they would become absorbed into
the body politic is the language that is used, and
that there would be no Indians after a while. But
(16:15):
in the short period of time, education was the means
to get to that end.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So when we go from this time in the late
eighteen hundreds to present day, take me to the evolution
of these schools. We're talking about this and the assimilation part,
the stripping away of a culture, ripping away from the family,
sounds terrible. How do we then get to murder of
(16:42):
all of these at four thousand that they know of?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
So is it the discipline or what I can tell
you about is that let me tell you a little
bit about the history of the Keeper Island School. I
mean it was created in eighteen eighty nine at a
time when multiple churches were interested in operating schools because
they got a sudden cash infusion from the federal government
(17:07):
to set up their missions essentially, and so there were
multiple churches that were interested in setting up schools. Keueper
Island was one of them that was set up in
eighteen eighty nine. But within the first ten, fifteen twenty
years of that school's operation, it became very clear that
there were problems in the way it was being run.
(17:27):
There were reports right out of the gate of children dying.
Children dying because they were either underfed, because the school
was not it was built in an inhospitable manner. They
were suffering. I mean we talk about the pandemic now,
that was the conditions that the children were living in
(17:48):
where there was infectious diseases that were running rampant, and
so the rate of death was very very high at
that point, as high as thirty forty fifty percent in
some years. In the early years of the operation of
the Keeper Island School, it became a challenge in fact
for the Catholic Church to try to encourage the Hulkamum
(18:10):
people to send their children to school because they weren't
coming home. So many of them weren't coming home, which
is in part why the federal government in nineteen twenty
said it is mandatory that all Indian children must be
educated in Indian boarding schools. They made it a law
that was punishable if families did not comply and said
(18:33):
their children to school. And that happened in nineteen twenty
and it was you know, it was in the face
of and with well documented evidence of the fact that
so many children were dying at the schools that was
the backdrop of the quote education system. It is quite
clear that and the federal government's own employees were documenting
(18:57):
the fact that the reason for the the number of
deaths of children at the school had to do with
the underfunding. Children were not being fed properly. And when
you talk with survivors, Kate, I mean that is probably
the one thing that all of them mentioned is that
they were hungry all the time. They just they you know,
(19:19):
they talk about the slot that they were served in
the morning, the rare, rare opportunities that they had to
actually eat any meat or protein. So there's no doubt
that that lack of food and nutrition was was a
big problem at the schools. But at Cuper Island, you
asked the question, how did these awful things start happening
(19:42):
to children? I think that's where you start to get
into the unusual confluence of the fact that it was
the federal government that was underfunding the schools, and it
was the churches that were running the schools, often unsupervised,
and as we all now know, throughout the world, there
(20:02):
are all kinds of problems in terms of the relationship
that priests and nuns have had with their subjects, and unfortunately,
sexual abuse is highly, highly common. And the Keeper Island School,
one of the reasons that we went there was that
(20:23):
we had heard that it was it was particularly it
was particularly ugly in terms of the treatment of children.
I think that the issue at Keeper Island in particular
was that it was especially out of side and out
of mind. It was on an island that children could
not escape from, and there are many instances documented instances
(20:44):
of children trying to escape from the school, trying to
set out in the ocean on a log or on
a stolen boat, or swimming even in the open ocean,
trying to leave the school. There are instances that we
went We cam through decades and decades of records Kate,
and there were all kinds of no We had no
(21:06):
troubles finding inquiries for example, into why children had died
in the middle of the ocean, and there were often
very i would say sterile government explanations as to why
this children may have died in confirming the cause of death,
but it seemed that no one asked the question why
(21:28):
why were they trying to escape? You know, why would
a seven year old or an eleven year old set
out in the ocean in an open boat in the
middle of the winter. It's clear that the children understood
that they didn't want to be there and there was
a reason why. We uncovered, for example, a police report
from nineteen thirty nine where one officer who was asked
to go and retrieve children who had escaped from the
(21:52):
island and actually made it home to their families. He
was ordered to go and retrieve the children and return
them to the school. He asked the question to the children,
why did you leave? Why would you try to set
out on such a dangerous journey off the island, and
they told him that they were being sexually abused, at
(22:14):
which point he set out to start to interview children
and then discovered that there were dozens of children in
nineteen thirty nine that were being sexually abused by multiple
people at the school, and the end result of that
report was that both the Catholic Church and the federal
government wanted the report quashed. They didn't want to see
(22:38):
any criminal charges laid, and the people who were being
accused or allegedly committing those sexual abuses were shuttled out
of the province quietly in the dead of the night.
So there was plenty of evidence for both the churches
and the federal government that there was sexual abuse happening.
(23:00):
On top of all of these children dying early on
in the nineteen hundreds and then well into the nineteen
thirties and nineteen forties, and yet the schools continued to operate,
They continued to run year after year. And this is
the situation that we set out to investigate when we
visited Penellicant.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So take me to the main characters of your story.
So you know, we have four children, one who didn't survive,
three who did. Can we set up what year this
is and what is their experience like?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
So I mentioned to you that in twenty twenty one
there was this incredible outpouring of grief and sadness amongst
indigenous people. When we set out to do this podcast.
That was the environment that we were kind of walking
into when we went to Pennellicut for the first time. Again,
I have had plenty of conversations with residential school survivors.
(23:56):
That's not something new to me, and it can often
be painful, but I'd never really experienced something quite so
raw as this. And one of the reasons that we
went to Penellicatet was because we had heard bad things
about Keeper Island. But I also knew from some of
my phone conversations that the community of Penellicant had already
(24:17):
started work of ground penetrating radar as early as twenty
thirteen twenty fourteen approximately. They had been at that work
for quite some time. There had been many reports among
survivors that children had died, and they were starting to
do that work of trying to figure out if they
were still buried on the island. So when we arrived
at Penellicot for the first time, it wasn't without some trepidation,
(24:40):
I will say, being indigenous, I wanted to make sure
that we did this podcast in a respectful way, and
then we did it with permission and consent of the
community because I knew how painful. It was going to
be what you know, Kate from when you sit down
and do a podcast with someone, it's not just a
you know, one and done, ask a couple questions and
then banks see you later throw the clips on the air.
(25:01):
These are going to be long, in depth conversations where
you're asking people about memories from long, long ago. And
then in our case, we ended up kind of investigating
a mystery on top of that and trying to uncover things.
And so I knew that this could be potentially quite
painful and bring up a lot of really difficult memories,
traumatic memories for survivors, and the last thing that I
(25:24):
wanted to do was as an Indigenous person, was to
cause them even more harm. So when we arrived at
Penellicut for the first time, we met with the Penellicatet
Elders Committee and sat down and explained, you know, what
we wanted to do with this podcast, what we were
hoping might come out of it. And the first question
that these elders asked me is, you know, what's a podcast?
(25:49):
And so after we kind of you know, spent some
time explaining what podcasts were, you know, we got into
the project with them again, they they had plenty of stories,
but there there was one mention of a boy that
had died, died hanging when he was at the school.
I remember, I remember distinctly sitting in the meeting with
(26:11):
all these old old Hulclaminum elders and and just some
of the sadness when they talked about that that particular death.
Later on that day I had my first opportunity to
see the site of the old Keueper Island Residential School.
The school closed in nineteen seventy five, and within a
(26:31):
year the people of Pennecticut had made an effort to
not only have it closed, but to have it completely
torn down. And literally within the next couple of years,
they had torn that building to the ground. It was
this gigantic, you know, three story brick monolith that was
(26:52):
standing in the middle of a rainforest. It looked they'd
looked completely out of place, and they did not want
to have that building any more evidence of it. Anyway.
As soon as it was closed, they moved to get
rid of it completely. So it wasn't much left of
the Keeper Island School itself. There's really only just the
(27:13):
stairwell that ran up to the front steps and the
old wharf where where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
Helcamia children had been dropped off by boat to go
to the Keeper Island School. That was really all that
was left of the school. So I met up with
a survivor, Tony Charlie. He invited his brother, who also
(27:34):
attended the school, James Charlie, to take me on a tour.
The reason that I wanted to talk with Tony is
because he had been vocal about sharing his experiences at
the residential school, and I know, I knew that he
had done some healing work, and I wasn't too worried
about unlocking trauma that would set him on a bad path.
(27:57):
I wanted to start that way with someone who had
done some healing already.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
So you met with two survivors in what years were
they at Keeper Island?
Speaker 2 (28:10):
So James and Tony attended Keeper Island School in the
nineteen sixties, and so they are, you know, the silver
haired elders now. But they quite graciously decided to introduce
me to the area and walk me around. The thing
you have to understand about the place the school had
been torn down. But what happened was that this community
(28:31):
kind of got built on top of the old school grounds,
and so where people line up for the ferry every
day was right where the front door of the school was.
And as we were walking along the road, you know,
we walked past and Tony said, oh, yeah, that's where
the gymnasium was, and there was a home sitting there now,
(28:52):
and he said, yeah, that's where the young boy died
when he was hanged. And the mention of this, this hanging,
this suicide as they called it, came up again during
my tour Tony. One of the reasons that I wanted
to visit with Tony was that he had spoken about
hearing that children were burned, that children were taken and
(29:18):
put into the place where they incinerated wood and scraps
from the school, and that he had heard from other
children that there were priests who had taken bodies of
children to be incinerated in the school. And so he
took me to that spot as well, where now there
(29:40):
were just gnarled old apple trees that were left over
from the orchards that used to grow around the school.
It was a shocking kind of tour, I'll tell you, Kate,
because I guess what became really obvious to me was
that every day community members of Penellicate were dry through
(30:00):
this area that had so many bad memories for them.
Their big house, which is their communal gathering place for ceremonies,
was right on the spot that was next to the
gymnasium where Richard Thomas had hung himself. And what they
found was when they were having winter ceremonies and inviting
(30:22):
people from all over Vancouver Island helcamedium people to come
and join them for celebrations and the traditional ceremonies that
they had done since time out of mind, people wouldn't come.
People wouldn't come to Connecticut because they were like, yeah,
I'm not going back to that place because I got
to walk past the place that I remember being dropped
off when I was six years old and all the
(30:43):
things that happened there. And so the school may have
been torn down, but these memories were just visceral and
being revisited upon community members daily every time that they
went down to the ferry.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Tell me specifically well as specific as you feel comfortable
being what Tony and James said they experienced at the school.
So they were there in the sixties, was this an
elementary school for them or were they.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Ten or how old were they? Tony and James initially
started going to the keep Around school as day students.
They were living with their uncle on penellicate and then
they shifted to as they got progressed when went up
in grades, they began going as boarding students. And again
(31:32):
this is where you start to find out some of
the odd ways that families were torn apart because they
were only about eighteen months apart in terms of age,
but they lived on different floors and rarely saw each
other because the older boys were separated from the younger boys,
and they had a sister that was at the school
who they barely knew at all. Because the boys and
(31:54):
the girls rarely interacted. They were completely separated, and so
you could begin to see just how unusual it was
and the deep impacts that it had on families. When
James and Tony told me about the fact that they
had getting to know each other was something that they
experienced in their adult lives, not so much as children,
(32:16):
even though they attended the same school.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
How often did the kids see their parents and did
the parents get a sense for anything being wrong?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Here and again part of The reason that Tony and
James were at the residential school was because their parents
had had a difficult history and Tony and James's mum died.
She had attended to keep her island school as well
and ended up on the streets of Seattle, not in
a good way, I'll put it that way, and she
(32:46):
ended up dying when both of them were young, which
is why he had been why both Tony and James
were living with their uncle and then ended up at
the school, so they had no parents to to tell,
nothing from the uncle. No. One of the important reasons
that I started with Tony, I mentioned that he had
(33:08):
done some healing. He had a lot of healing to
do because he experienced sexual abuse at the hands of
one of the all Blake brothers who ran the school,
and Tony was involved in both civil and criminal cases
(33:29):
that were instrumental in getting that particular all Blake brother
charged and convicted criminally. So Tony had been on a
long journey because he had a lot of pain to
deal with being repeatedly preyed upon and sexually abused by
one all Blake brother. And as I learned, as I
(33:53):
began to know Tony and James Moore. It wasn't just Tony,
it was James as well. And it wasn't just one
all blate brother. There were multiple ob late brothers who
abused the young boys.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So you have a third survivor also, is it Belvy?
Is that how you say?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yes? Bellvy brother?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Was Belvy in their cohort or in a different cohort.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
After our tour, we stopped at the place where the
where the gym used to be and and they, I said,
the elders mentioned this, this boy, you know, hanging what
happened there? And they said, oh, you know, he was
such a happy, happy kid, and we don't know what happened. James,
there's a lot of fire in him. And and and
(34:36):
he said, you know the story that they told about
the way he died, that that was a lie. That
was a lie. They said that he was worried about
his parents and going home, and that's not the truth.
That's all he told me. But it raised questions in
our heads about this boy that had died hanging in
(34:56):
the gym, And so we set out to try to
find any relatives of this boy, Richard Thomas, and we
ended up meeting his sister Bellvy brother. Bellvie is also
a member. She's a Hull Camtum from a different First
nation that's on Vancouver Island, the Hallal First Nation. And
(35:17):
as I said, there were families from up and down
the island that sent their children to go to the
Keeper Island School. Bellvie attended the Keeper Island School a
little bit before. She was a little bit older than
Tony and James. She was there in the late nineteen
fifties and early nineteen sixties, a little bit before Tony
and James, and so we ended up meeting Bellvy and
(35:38):
Bellvie had had just a was I still remember the conversation, Kate.
I mean, it was horrific to hear her own memories
of the sexual abuse that she experienced at the school.
It just seemed like it was completely rampant there. But
also we asked her, you know, about Richard, and she
(36:01):
had this incredible conversation with me. Kate the first time
I met her where she said, I remember Richard phoning
days before he was about to graduate. I remember him phoning,
and they graduated in grade ten. The schools only went
to grade ten at that point. I remember him phoning
in early June morning and saying, I just can't wait
(36:24):
to get out of this hell hole. And she said,
you can't talk that way, Richard. She was she was
a little bit older than him. He was, he was
Bellvy's younger, younger brother. Said you can't talk that way.
And you have to understand, Kate, that in the communities
at that time, the priests they really held, you know,
they held a great deal of power in the community.
(36:48):
They were they were in high esteem because you know,
after decades and decades and decades of missionary work, the
many many many helkamina and people were had converted to
Christian and you listened when the priest spoke. That was
the way up at that time. And so she said
to him, you can't speak that way, and he said,
I'm going to tell everything when I get out of
(37:10):
this hell hole. And then she remembers the phone being
cut off, and apparently at that time it was a
communal phone line, and the word amongst the children was
that the priests and the nuns would listen in when
they tried to phone home, and Bellvy reports that the
phone kind of dropped at that point, and it was
only within a week later that there was another phone
(37:32):
call at Belvy's house, and this time it was the
head of the school who was saying that Richard had
been found dead. So Belvy had always asked questions about
her brother's death. There is no fact, there's no disputing
that Richard was found hanging in the gym. There are
news reports that he had been found hanging, and we
(37:55):
ended up uncovering an on autopsy report as well, which
also can firm that he had been found hanging.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
No other signs of struggle or defense or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
There did not appear to be We took that autopsy
report to an indigenous corner actually, who examined it carefully
for us and said, you know, this isn't how we
would do a coroner's report in this day and age.
It was about two or three pages long, and she said,
if a fifteen year old boy died at school, we
(38:27):
would have, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages.
We would have all kinds of samples and things like that.
She said, there's nothing in this that I can see.
No photographs. They didn't have photographs. There were photographs, yes,
And I'll tell you, Kate, I've been a reporter for
for over two decades, and when I first saw those
pictures it was very difficult to see. I don't know
(38:50):
if you've seen pictures of dead people, but it is.
It's not something you can unsee. It's hard for me
to think about them right now. But the corner looked
at them and said, you know, it does appear to
be consistent with hanging.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Did she talk though, about strangulation and then a hanging
like the possibility that this would be murder that would
give you the exact same results, Patikia everything else that
she's looking at. Was it possible somebody else would have
done this and then hanged them up somehow?
Speaker 2 (39:18):
So the point that you're raising right now is something
that we began to uncover as we spoke to more
and more survivors from Cuper Island about the death of
Richard Thomas. Those kinds of and i'll call them whisperings
had been going on amongst survivors for decades decades. It
(39:39):
happened in nineteen sixty six that Richard Thomas died, but
for decades people had been asking the same questions that
you had. And here's I'll tell you why. One of
the incredible things as we began to reach out to
more and more survivors about Richard Thomas's death, was that
there were lots of people who had witnessed Richard hanging
(40:03):
in the gym. As children, They had witnessed Richard hanging
in the gym, and this was not an uncommon story
where which we heard from multiple people that they had
been taken into the gym by the nuns and priests,
or that they had had access to the gym and
(40:24):
had seen Richard hanging, that Richard had been hanging there
for a period of time, And there were multiple children
that were in the gym and witnessed Richard hanging, and
that seemed to be even more incredible to us that,
you know, it is no doubt that this awful thing happened,
but the fact that there were so many children that
(40:46):
witnessed it seemed very very unusual to say the least,
And imagine the trauma of being a young child and
seeing one of your schoolmates hanging hanging in the middle
of the school gym. But on top of that, the
other thing that became very very i will say puzzling,
to say the very least, is that the autopsy report
(41:08):
showed that police did investigate. It wasn't that it was
swept under the rug or anything like that. Police did
investigate and filed a report and interviewed the oblates, and
they also interviewed three children. The official story that the
oblatees gave was that Richard had been missing from school.
In the morning, he was seen having breakfast. One of
(41:31):
the oblates had left the island to take a group
of children off island for a school trip. The other
oblate was working with another group of children. No one
exactly knew where Richard was, and then suddenly, late and
late in the evening, after the children had gone to bed,
Richard was discovered missing and then found hanging in the gym.
That was the report that the oblates gave to the
(41:53):
police and that the police ended up affirming as the
cause of death. But they also interviewed three children who
said that they had been playing with Richard in the
gym and that he had been playing with a rope
and reading the Bible. That was the story that the
three children shared with the police officers. Two of the children.
(42:16):
We ended up tracking down and trying to find the
children who had supposedly witnessed Richard's death. Two of the
children had passed away, we weren't able to connect with them,
but one of them was still alive and he had
a very different version of events. Certainly, he had been
playing with Richard in the gym, but it was the
children who discovered Richard hanging in the gym after the
(42:41):
lights had gone out mysteriously while they were playing for
a period of time. Donnie Sampson, who was the survivor
who we spoke with, had a very different memory of
Richard's death, And all of the children who witnessed Richard
hanging in the gym, his wife being one of them,
that seemed to be very had been left out of
(43:05):
the official account of the day. So all of these
things were fueling the whisperings i'll call them, the suspicions
amongst survivors over the years about how it was that
Richard had actually ended up hanging and was it possible
that he had been murdered. There was certainly lots of evidence,
(43:28):
and when we begin to get into this in the podcast,
that there was one ob late brother in particular who
had a terrible relationship with Richard Thomas and an ob
late brother who had terrible relationship, as it turns out,
with Tony and James Charlie, who ended up sexually abusing
Tony and James Charlie when he took them away to
(43:49):
his own family home in Montreal in nineteen sixty seven.
So there were lots and lots of uncomfortable and unpleasant
and inconvenient stories that we were hearing from survivors about
Richard's death. That certainly raised a lot of questions about
the way that his death had been investigated. But more importantly,
(44:14):
I guess Kate, they really raised questions about who, if anyone,
was caring for the welfare of these children.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Well, let me ask you what happens after these kids?
And I don't just mean this group of Tony and
James and Bellvy and any of these other kids, but
in general, when they graduate in tenth grade, what happens?
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Where do they end up going?
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Do they get jobs somewhere? Do they go back to
their indigenous communities and reunite with their families?
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yeah, and so again, as I said, the school at
Keuper Island only went to grade ten. Tony and James
ended off ended up going to a different residential school
where they suffered a new set of problems and unpleasantness.
Belvie went on an interesting journey. She said she did
(45:06):
not want to be indigenous. And I keep using the
term Indian because that is the term of the time
and the term, you know, she did not want to
be Indian. She has said, I had nuns, you know,
pulling my hair and saying you dirty Indian, you know,
throughout my entire childhood. And I internalized that and I
(45:27):
didn't want to have anything to do with my family,
or my heritage or my culture. And so she married
a white man. She married a white man so that
she could start to try to turn the page on
just being indigenous at all. As it turned out, that
relationship wasn't a very good one either, where she suffered
a lot of domestic abuse and she began became a
(45:49):
drinker for a period of time. But in both cases
with I told you at the outset that this was
the story of three children, three who survived and one
who didn't. For Belvy, for James, and for Tony, the
school was never far from their memory. I mean it
was not something that they ever felt that as they
grew up into their adult years, it plagued them, you know,
(46:11):
the ripple effect of residential schools began to impact, you know,
the way they worked, the way they loved, the people
who they loved. And so all of them have children,
and we interviewed Belvy's children and James's children, and they report,
(46:33):
you know that, and this is where things become very complicated.
This is where you start to talk about intergenerational abuse
and the things that the priests and nuns did to
the children at the residential schools they ended up perpetuating
on their own children. And so we had a very
gripping and shockingly honest conversation with Fergie Charlie, who was
(46:59):
one of James Charlie these sons, about his father and
being terrified, absolutely terrified of his dad because his dad
had an irrational anger that would explode and he would
take out on his children. Put yourself in the in
the shoes of a young of a young boy, a
young son, not knowing anything about residential schools, not knowing
(47:21):
about what his dad had experienced, that he had been
sexually abused at these places. He didn't know where that
was coming from until his late adult years. And James,
to his absolute credit, you know, when we began to
hear the stories of their children and the challenges that
they faced having relationships with their parents. You know, James
(47:42):
was quite open about that and said, I have done
harm to my wife and to my family, and I
will spend the rest of my life trying to heal
and to help my family, you know, to become whole again.
And so when I when I talked about the goal
of the residential schools being to blow up the family,
(48:05):
that's perhaps the most bitter irony out of all of this, Kate,
is that, yes, the schools operated for a period of time,
but the ripple effects of what the children experience there
are still being felt today in Indigenous communities across Canada
and the United States, and it's being perpetrated by our
own people. The lateral violence that now exists in many
(48:27):
Native American and First Nation communities in Canada often has
its roots in the kind of traumas that children experienced
at residential school whether it's suffering sexual abuse, whether it's
being told that they were dirty Indians, whether it's being
not learning their indigenous languages, being ripped of their mother tongue,
(48:48):
being ripped away from them, and being strapped because they
were speaking their indigenous languages, or whether it's something as
gruesome as seeing a boy hanging in a gym when
you really shouldn't ever be exposed to such a thing.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
How is the Canadian government now today twenty twenty five,
How does the Canadian government view that history? Is it
not embracing the history but accepting it and amplifying it
so people can learn, or do you know where does
the Canadian government stand with this history?
Speaker 2 (49:19):
I think you have to understand that we're a little
bit farther ahead in Canada than perhaps you are in
the United States, although there have been efforts in the
past couple of years to try to try to expose
some of what happened and Indian boarding schools in the
United States, But in Canada, I think the biggest difference
(49:42):
is that residential school survivors, starting in about the early
nineteen mid nineteen nineties, began going to court. And there
are reasons why the federal government, for example, launched the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It wasn't out of some kind
of more benevolence. It wasn't because they thought it was
(50:03):
the right thing to do. It was because it was
court ordered.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Well, yeah, that's usually where things start to move is
court ordered.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
Yes, and so you know that entire investigation and thorough
investigation the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was as a result
of a court settlement between survivors and the Canadian government.
The Canadian government has made many nice noises. Our former
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the Canadian government would
(50:31):
accept wholeheartedly all ninety four calls to action that the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission made in twenty fifteen to fix
things like the justice system, to change the education system,
to deal with our media. For example. There were many,
many recommendations that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made in
terms of the way that Canada needed to change to
(50:54):
move forward. Has the Canadian government made as much movement
as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hoped. Absolutely not. It's
well documented that they've only moved forward on a handful
of the ninety four calls to action. We have a
new Prime minister and we'll see, we'll see whether or
not he's as interested in trying to earnestly move forward
(51:19):
on this project of reconciliation between indigenous peoples in the
Canadian state.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
But how do you take this issue that the Truth
and Reconciliation Committee has brought up all of these points,
the things that need to change. How do you bring
that to the top when in Canada, much like in
the US, there's a struggle over the economy, over industry,
you have a new PM, how do you say this
(51:45):
is important too, because I could absolutely, of course see
this being pushed down, down, down, because there's so much
more you know that seems systemic, and what we're dealing
with in the US and you all are dealing with
in Canada is immediate. It's the economy, it's people paychecks
and everything. So how do you keep that? How do
you advocates keep that at the top of the list?
Speaker 2 (52:06):
So the Keeper Islean podcast has been out for a
couple of years now and people have had an opportunity
to listen to it. So I don't feel badly telling
you about the end of the podcast. It's a bit
of a spoiler alert if you haven't listened to the
Keeper Islean podcast, I'm about to take you right to
the very very end.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
Let me pause by saying to the audience, you need
to listen to this podcast because you know Duncan, and
I cannot do justice to the voices that he has
coming to this to illuminate the story, energize it, and
make you feel, you know, not just the pain, but
hope that happens with this kind of story. So you
(52:45):
can spoil it all you want, it's still a podcast
that needs to be listened to.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
You know, well, thank you, I appreciate those. Those are
very meaningful words, And thank you, I appreciate that. And
we wrap it up with the way that storytellers always
wrap it up. We bring back our or the subjects
who we spent time with, Tony and James and and
and bell Vy, and we tell a little bit about
where they're at and and and that that, you know,
(53:09):
maybe the typical end, you know, ride off into the sunset,
if you will. But Jody, and and and Martha and
I felt that after spending a year going back and
forth to Connecticut and visiting and spending time, what we
began to understand is that we had told the story
of one boy, Richard Thomas, this incredible boy who it
(53:30):
turns out, was not morose and wasn't having suicidal thoughts.
Turned out he was a creative writer who ended up.
You know, we found his published works. For Heaven's sakes,
you know, a boy who had great aspirations actually to
become a priest of all things, which was you know,
unheard of at that time native priests. You know, we
had learned that there was love in this boy's life,
(53:51):
and that his death had caused incredible suffering and pain
to his family, that that touched off sparked all kinds
of misery for for his extended family. We learned an
awful lot about this boy, and we had hoped that
that perhaps that that by by sharing some of his
stories and his family stories, that that people would be
(54:14):
able to picture this, this loss, this you know, that
it wasn't just a black and white archival photo that
we see of, you know, these these dark children in
these in these stiff uniforms, but that maybe we'd be
able to humanize him. As we were trying to figure
out how to wrap this thing up and finish the podcast,
very practical technical kind of you know, thing to do
(54:36):
as a journalist, we went, holy cow, there there are
one hundred and sixty names at Cuper Island who we
have not spent eight episodes investigating. We've only you know
glancingly referred to a few of them. And so Jody
went out to outside of Vancouver along the beautiful sea wall.
(54:59):
And for those of you ever been to British Columbia,
you know, if you go to the Salish Sea, it's
a stunning place. And she explained the project to people
who happen to be just walking along the sea wall
and enjoying the beauty of this land, and she said,
could you just read the names? Read the names of
the children who died at this school, at this place.
And there are one hundred and sixty documented names at
(55:21):
this point, and that list is still growing as they
try to do the archival research and find out who
all the children who died. And so we end the
podcast with this long scroll of people Canadians reading the
names of these deceased children. And I'll tell you we
debated this for a while, Kate, because it's kind of
(55:41):
like going to the Vietnam Memorial. You know, when you
go there, it is it's just a black wall. But
I don't know if you've been, but when I visited
that place, I was staggered. I was staggered by just
that presentation of names. And likewise, I mean, there are
many people. You know, Indigenous people are not the only
(56:03):
people that have experienced the Holocaust, right, I mean, there
are many human beings can be terrible to other human beings.
But this the residential schools, they are our Holocaust in
many ways. And when we heard this list of names
of one hundred and sixty children who died at this school,
when federal officials knew, when church's officials knew, when Canadians
(56:28):
unfortunately should have known, because it was quite public that
children were dying, and nobody did anything. When you hear
these names that go on for five or six minutes,
and Canadians who wanted to do justice, I'll give them
that they wanted. They wanted, they understood the solemnity of
just reading a child's name. You know. Those are children
(56:51):
that never made it home. Those are Indigenous children who
never got to live their dreams. Those are Indigenous children
who never got to have families. And when you hear
that list of names, I'll tell you it's still upset.
It still moves me now thinking about it, because it
(57:13):
just you ask me, you know, what is the Canadian
government doing? I like to turn it around and ask
Canadians now that you know. Now that you know, if
you did not know this history, now that you know,
what are you doing about it? What are you doing
about it? Because we can debate about, you know, political
(57:36):
policy and partisanship and what one party is going to
do with regard to Indigenous relations versus another party, but
at the end of the day, this is going to
be about Canadians and honestly Americans reckoning with this history
and understanding that there is a silence and there has
(57:56):
been an erasure about this history both of our countries
for a reason, and it is having ongoing impacts on
the certainly the health of Indigenous communities in this country,
but on the economies of both of our countries, the
(58:17):
fact that Indigenous people are not fully contributing to it.
And so that's going to end up being on citizens
to start to make a change, and that starts with
it can be low hanging fruit. I don't you know.
It was incredible to me in twenty twenty one to
go down on Canada Day, which is a little bit
(58:39):
like our July fourth or your July fourth, when Canadians
typically put on red and white and go in way
of the flag to see thousands and thousands and thousands
of Canadians putting on orange shirts. Orange has become known
and synonymous with residential school survivors. It was astonishing to
me to go and eat with a bunch of Canadians
(59:02):
walking down and demanding change, demanding that these kinds of
injustices need to be marked and not continue. So change
could happen that way. But we all know that it's
hard to sustain that kind of level of change. But
it also needs to happen just on a simple you
know there's low hanging fruit. You can listen to a podcast.
(59:22):
You could go and follow five Indigenous musicians on your
musical streaming service. You could read a book by someone
like Daniel Telaga, for example. There are all kinds of
Indigenous authors who who will help you understand Indigenous realities
in this country in ways that hopefully will start to improve.
(59:43):
And that was some of the goals of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. I told you that I covered these
stories for years and years. I remember going to a
Truth and Reconciliation Commission event and there were I'm not
kidding you, Kate, there were thousands of children, thousands of
children that attended that event, this very very very upsetting
(01:00:04):
place where survivors were coming to tell their truths, to
tell their stories about the things that happened to them.
And I said to the organizer of the event, why
are there's so many children here, young children? He said,
because we're planting seeds so that the next generation, the
next generation understands that this happened and that they remember it,
and that we begin to start to see change. And
(01:00:27):
I can say now, now I'm a journalism professor, I teach,
and I can say now that fifteen years ago, when
I started teaching and I would talk about residential schools
in the classroom, there weren't any students who really knew
much about residential school and that fortunately has started to change.
That started to change. There are kids books about residential schools.
There are textbooks about residential schools, and I think that's
(01:00:50):
where the hope lies. Okay, you know, if this was
a podcast about three kids who survived and one who didn't,
I think the hope for all of this is that
both Indigenous families start to repair the harm that was
done and start to begin to say I love you.
And that's work that we as indigenous people's need to do.
(01:01:11):
We need to start healing the harms that have been
inflicted upon our families and make our families stronger. And
Canadians need to start saying to their neighbors, I hear you.
You know we don't ignore anymore. I hear you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:38):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis
(01:02:01):
a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(01:02:22):
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at Tenfold More Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words pod
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. Why why were
they trying to escape?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
You know? Why would a seven year old or an
eleven year old set out in the ocean in an
open boat in the middle of the winter. It's clear
that the children understood that they didn't want to be there,
and there was a reason why.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists,
(00:58):
filmmakers and podcasters who we have investigated and reported on
notorious true crime cases. This is about the choices writers make,
both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into
the unpublished details behind their stories. Cuper Island is a
remarkable podcast an investigation into one of Canada's most notorious
(01:20):
so called Indian residential schools. Journalists Duncan McHugh explores the
unsolved death of a student, a tragedy that sheds light
on rampant abuse and exposes the trauma of three survivors.
A trigger warning. We talk about suicide in this episode.
When people ask you what the podcast is about in
(01:43):
a the elevator pitch really simple terms here, what do
you say that Cuper Island is about?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
When people ask, I tell them it's about four kids.
I tell them it's about four kids that attended a school,
an Indian residential school. Three of them survived and one didn't.
It is about long, long history in our country. There
were over one hundred residential schools in every province of Canada,
as there were Indian boarding schools in the United States
(02:10):
as well. This is just the story of one boarding school.
But more than that, the Keeper On podcast is about
three children and we did our best, producers Jody Martinson
and Martha Troyan and I, we did our best to
try to explore the lives of those kids when they
were in school and through the eyes of the three
(02:31):
who survived. But it was very much a journey that
we weren't expecting when we started into the life of
one boy who died, Richard Thomas, and trying to find
out how he died and why he died, and that
ended up being an extraordinary, extraordinary journey.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Let's start with how you came into this project, and
once we get through that, then let's set the scene
for where we start the story.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So I have been a reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
the CBC, which is our public broadcaster in Canada, for
over twenty five years, doing television current affairs documentaries about
all issues under the sun. But I'm also in a shnabe.
I am a Jibwa from a small First nation in
southern Ontario, and that has very much informed my work
(03:19):
over the years. I have never exclusively reported on Indigenous issues,
but it's always been important to me to have more
Indigenous voices in our newscasts, and so I have done
reporting on residential schools for literally two decades as a
journalist for the CBC because it is a huge part
(03:39):
of our life in this country. Some people like to
say that it's a dark chapter of Canadian history. To me,
it's the whole story kit. You know, when you start
to learn about the history of Indian residential schools, why
they were created, how the children were treated when they
(03:59):
were at the schools and taken away from their families.
You start to understand so many of the problems and
challenges that First Nations people face now today in Canada.
It all often points back to their treatment in the
residential schools. So I am well familiar being a Nishinabe myself.
(04:22):
I have extended family who went to residential schools, and
certainly I have had friends and lovers and family members
who are impacted by the residential schools. You can't be
an Indigenous person in Canada or the United States for
that matter and not be impacted by residential schools somehow.
So for me it was a personal story, but also
(04:44):
as a journalist, as a reporter, I have spent a
career trying to unpack that story and explain it to
Canadians and why we had, you know, a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in this country specifically to look into residential
schools and the legacy that it has left us as
a country. It became particularly i would say heated though
(05:05):
in twenty twenty one, when one school in particular, the
Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, announced that they
had I would say, uncovered over two hundred on marked graves,
that the fact that children died at residential schools was
not a mystery. It wasn't it wasn't hidden. The Truth
and Reconciliation Commission spent over five years crisscrossing the country
(05:30):
gathering volumes and volumes and volumes of evidence of the
mistreatment of children in the schools, and they clearly stated
that over four thousand children died while attending Indian residential
schools over the course of a century. So it was
not it wasn't a surprise to Indigenous people. We have
(05:53):
been telling those stories amongst our family and to the
media for a long time now, that our children did
not come home from the schools. They were sent off
to be quote educated, and many of them did not
come home. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission put a hard
number on that at well over four thousand children, and
(06:14):
certainly there were even headlines at the time of the
number of deaths of children at residential school but it
didn't seem to really resonate with Canadians until this announcement
in twenty twenty one. Of the unmarked graves that were
found at the Kamlibs Indian residential school and I remember
it so clearly, Kate. I mean, it was sort of
(06:36):
a social media announcement on a late Friday afternoon. My gosh,
like you know, over the weekend, it just seemed that
this it was like a band aid was being ripped
off of a wound that had not had a chance
to scar yet. Because the pain that came out of
(06:56):
that announcement amongst Indigenous people was just visceral. My heart
is getting heavy just telling you about it and remembering
that time. And for some reason, Kate, that I cannot
explain to you, being having been a journalist and covered
this and told Canadians this story. But for some reason,
this announcement in twenty twenty one really struck a chord
(07:19):
with Canadians, and all of a sudden, at residential schools
sites former residential school sites and at Catholic churches, people
were lining up to lay down flowers to put little
children's shoes, you know, And there were these kind of
growing memorials that were happening right across the country over
(07:39):
the course of the week. And then there were a
number of other First Nation communities who announced that they
had former residential schools on their sites where they had
been doing ground penetrating radar work and had also uncovered
on Mark Graves, and so over the course of a month,
I would say there was this announcement after announce after announcement. Again,
(08:02):
none of this is a surprise. It's well documented that
Indigenous children died at the schools, but for some reason,
it just Canadians got it for the first time. These
were small children who were ostensibly being educated, but that
is not what happened. They died, They literally died, and
our families have been trying to deal with that ever since.
(08:25):
So at that time, CBC Podcasts approached me and said,
we think you should, you should take a deeper look
at this, and I said, I'd be happy to. This
is the kind of story that deserves a treatment. And
I had been reporting in British Columbia for a number
of years. I've been based out of Vancouver, BC, and
as I said, I've done lots of plenty of residential
(08:47):
school stories, about the court cases, about sexual abuse, all
kinds of different things. I had heard a lot about
the Keeper Island School being a particularly notorious one. We'll
put it that way. It was It was a place
that the survivors of that school called it Alcatraz because
it was located on an island. The island the indigenous
(09:09):
name of the island is Pennellicate. It is a place
where the hull Caomina people have lived since time out
of mind. The colonizers or the settlers changed the name
to the Keuper Island, and that was the name of
the residential school that was located there. It was about
three I'm going to say three miles roughly from Vancouver Island,
(09:30):
a small island in the middle of the Salish Sea.
I think one of the reasons that it had the
reputation that it did, and certainly why it was called Alcatraz,
was because it was out of side and out of mind,
you know, a place where children from up and down
Vancouver Island were taken and dropped and left at this
school that was run by a Catholic order called the
(09:53):
Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and it operated for over one
hundred years. And as I said, I had heard pretty
awful things about that place. And so when we were
trying to figure out how do we explain this history
of residential schools and and also this phenomenon of the
(10:14):
deaths of children and the unmarked grades. I thought that
perhaps the easiest way to do that might be through
just one school, rather than than trying to to to
encompass this this giant history. Maybe if we just focused
on one school, we might be able to to help
Canadians understand because there there are all kinds of history
(10:34):
books about about residential schools, and there have been movies made,
and it's it's an unpleasant it's an unpleasant aspect of
both Canadian and American history, which serves the countries of
Canada and the United States. It serves them well to
not remember this history because it is it is. As
(10:55):
I say, it's certainly a dark period and a shameful one.
And it's not something that was part of my education
growing up, as in elementary or secondary education. Certainly not
even in my post secondary education. It's not something that
many of us of our age learned about. And so
(11:16):
it was important to us to try to help Canadians
understand through the lens of this one school, this place
that survivors Noah's Alcatraz, what happened there and what life
was like for children who went to that school.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Give me a very brief history of how these Indian
residential schools even came about. Help me understand why this
would be something that Indigenous people would not accept, but
it just it happened, And how can this happen?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
When you look back at a why or how in
Indian residential schools were created, you do have to go
take a peak back into history, and it does take
you back into the eighteen hundreds at a time when
there was an incredible amount of change going on in
both Canada and the United States for indigenous people and
(12:14):
the settlers are moving across the country and defining the
nations that they were about to become. And at that time,
when you look back at the records, you'll see that
my people, the Nishnabek, for example, understood that life was changing,
that there was a new way of looking at the
(12:36):
world and surviving in the world, and that was going
to involve working alongside the newcomers, the white people. That
was part of the purpose of the treaties from an
Aniabk perspective, was having agreements for using the land with
the settlers and the white people. But they also understood
(12:58):
that there were skills that would be helpful to them
in terms of adjusting to a new way of life.
And so early on in the relationship. In the mid
eighteen hundreds, you saw that there were First Nation people,
and again I referred to my own people, to Nishnabe,
who were interested in sending their kids to get the
(13:18):
white man's education. They saw that it could be valuable
to them, and so they quite willingly actually said, yes,
we would like our children to learn the white man's
skills and learn the white man's language. And so the
early residential schools were set up with the agreement of
the First Nation's people that they would share their children
(13:41):
for a short period of time each year, and that's
how they started. But things took a dark turn in
the late eighteen hundreds, around about the time that Canada
became a country. Our first prime minister, his name was
John A. McDonald. He actually looked to the United States.
John A. McDonald had a very different project in mind.
(14:01):
He was trying to clear the west, clear the prairies
and make way for a national railway and settlement of
the pioneers and Indians. Indigenous people stood in the way
of that project. That is quite clear. He made no
bones about that and he felt that the easiest way
(14:23):
to get rid of quote the Indian problem, and that's
how it was referred to, was to separate children from
their families. And so that idea didn't come out of nowhere.
It came out of him sending an emissary down to
the United States and studying the boarding schools that had
been set up with Indian children in the United States.
(14:45):
So the whole idea to separate children from their families,
to blow up Indigenous families, that was what really sparked
the creation of Indian residential school and for cost saving purposes,
it really helped to have a partner in that project,
(15:06):
and that was the churches. The churches saw it as
being an opportunity to have a whole bunch of new
converts and so quite willingly signed up to run the
education of Indian children, financed by the federal government, the
Canadian government, but it was a partnership between state and church.
(15:30):
And so in the late eighteen hundreds we go from
a small handful of schools with First Nations who were
interested in getting a white man's education, to it becoming
the official policy of the Canadian government with regard to
education of Indian children, and there's no bones about it.
It is quite clear in Sir John A. McDonald's writings
(15:53):
and his philosophy that the entire entire aim of that
project was not so much education as it was assimilation.
It was his hope and the hope of his staff
that Indians would disappear, that they would become absorbed into
the body politic is the language that is used, and
that there would be no Indians after a while. But
(16:15):
in the short period of time, education was the means
to get to that end.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So when we go from this time in the late
eighteen hundreds to present day, take me to the evolution
of these schools. We're talking about this and the assimilation part,
the stripping away of a culture, ripping away from the family,
sounds terrible. How do we then get to murder of
(16:42):
all of these at four thousand that they know of?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
So is it the discipline or what I can tell
you about is that let me tell you a little
bit about the history of the Keeper Island School. I
mean it was created in eighteen eighty nine at a
time when multiple churches were interested in operating schools because
they got a sudden cash infusion from the federal government
(17:07):
to set up their missions essentially, and so there were
multiple churches that were interested in setting up schools. Keueper
Island was one of them that was set up in
eighteen eighty nine. But within the first ten, fifteen twenty
years of that school's operation, it became very clear that
there were problems in the way it was being run.
(17:27):
There were reports right out of the gate of children dying.
Children dying because they were either underfed, because the school
was not it was built in an inhospitable manner. They
were suffering. I mean we talk about the pandemic now,
that was the conditions that the children were living in
(17:48):
where there was infectious diseases that were running rampant, and
so the rate of death was very very high at
that point, as high as thirty forty fifty percent in
some years. In the early years of the operation of
the Keeper Island School, it became a challenge in fact
for the Catholic Church to try to encourage the Hulkamum
(18:10):
people to send their children to school because they weren't
coming home. So many of them weren't coming home, which
is in part why the federal government in nineteen twenty
said it is mandatory that all Indian children must be
educated in Indian boarding schools. They made it a law
that was punishable if families did not comply and said
(18:33):
their children to school. And that happened in nineteen twenty
and it was you know, it was in the face
of and with well documented evidence of the fact that
so many children were dying at the schools that was
the backdrop of the quote education system. It is quite
clear that and the federal government's own employees were documenting
(18:57):
the fact that the reason for the the number of
deaths of children at the school had to do with
the underfunding. Children were not being fed properly. And when
you talk with survivors, Kate, I mean that is probably
the one thing that all of them mentioned is that
they were hungry all the time. They just they you know,
(19:19):
they talk about the slot that they were served in
the morning, the rare, rare opportunities that they had to
actually eat any meat or protein. So there's no doubt
that that lack of food and nutrition was was a
big problem at the schools. But at Cuper Island, you
asked the question, how did these awful things start happening
(19:42):
to children? I think that's where you start to get
into the unusual confluence of the fact that it was
the federal government that was underfunding the schools, and it
was the churches that were running the schools, often unsupervised,
and as we all now know, throughout the world, there
(20:02):
are all kinds of problems in terms of the relationship
that priests and nuns have had with their subjects, and unfortunately,
sexual abuse is highly, highly common. And the Keeper Island School,
one of the reasons that we went there was that
(20:23):
we had heard that it was it was particularly it
was particularly ugly in terms of the treatment of children.
I think that the issue at Keeper Island in particular
was that it was especially out of side and out
of mind. It was on an island that children could
not escape from, and there are many instances documented instances
(20:44):
of children trying to escape from the school, trying to
set out in the ocean on a log or on
a stolen boat, or swimming even in the open ocean,
trying to leave the school. There are instances that we
went We cam through decades and decades of records Kate,
and there were all kinds of no We had no
(21:06):
troubles finding inquiries for example, into why children had died
in the middle of the ocean, and there were often
very i would say sterile government explanations as to why
this children may have died in confirming the cause of death,
but it seemed that no one asked the question why
(21:28):
why were they trying to escape? You know, why would
a seven year old or an eleven year old set
out in the ocean in an open boat in the
middle of the winter. It's clear that the children understood
that they didn't want to be there and there was
a reason why. We uncovered, for example, a police report
from nineteen thirty nine where one officer who was asked
to go and retrieve children who had escaped from the
(21:52):
island and actually made it home to their families. He
was ordered to go and retrieve the children and return
them to the school. He asked the question to the children,
why did you leave? Why would you try to set
out on such a dangerous journey off the island, and
they told him that they were being sexually abused, at
(22:14):
which point he set out to start to interview children
and then discovered that there were dozens of children in
nineteen thirty nine that were being sexually abused by multiple
people at the school, and the end result of that
report was that both the Catholic Church and the federal
government wanted the report quashed. They didn't want to see
(22:38):
any criminal charges laid, and the people who were being
accused or allegedly committing those sexual abuses were shuttled out
of the province quietly in the dead of the night.
So there was plenty of evidence for both the churches
and the federal government that there was sexual abuse happening.
(23:00):
On top of all of these children dying early on
in the nineteen hundreds and then well into the nineteen
thirties and nineteen forties, and yet the schools continued to operate,
They continued to run year after year. And this is
the situation that we set out to investigate when we
visited Penellicant.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So take me to the main characters of your story.
So you know, we have four children, one who didn't survive,
three who did. Can we set up what year this
is and what is their experience like?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
So I mentioned to you that in twenty twenty one
there was this incredible outpouring of grief and sadness amongst
indigenous people. When we set out to do this podcast.
That was the environment that we were kind of walking
into when we went to Pennellicut for the first time. Again,
I have had plenty of conversations with residential school survivors.
(23:56):
That's not something new to me, and it can often
be painful, but I'd never really experienced something quite so
raw as this. And one of the reasons that we
went to Penellicatet was because we had heard bad things
about Keeper Island. But I also knew from some of
my phone conversations that the community of Penellicant had already
(24:17):
started work of ground penetrating radar as early as twenty
thirteen twenty fourteen approximately. They had been at that work
for quite some time. There had been many reports among
survivors that children had died, and they were starting to
do that work of trying to figure out if they
were still buried on the island. So when we arrived
at Penellicot for the first time, it wasn't without some trepidation,
(24:40):
I will say, being indigenous, I wanted to make sure
that we did this podcast in a respectful way, and
then we did it with permission and consent of the
community because I knew how painful. It was going to
be what you know, Kate from when you sit down
and do a podcast with someone, it's not just a
you know, one and done, ask a couple questions and
then banks see you later throw the clips on the air.
(25:01):
These are going to be long, in depth conversations where
you're asking people about memories from long, long ago. And
then in our case, we ended up kind of investigating
a mystery on top of that and trying to uncover things.
And so I knew that this could be potentially quite
painful and bring up a lot of really difficult memories,
traumatic memories for survivors, and the last thing that I
(25:24):
wanted to do was as an Indigenous person, was to
cause them even more harm. So when we arrived at
Penellicut for the first time, we met with the Penellicatet
Elders Committee and sat down and explained, you know, what
we wanted to do with this podcast, what we were
hoping might come out of it. And the first question
that these elders asked me is, you know, what's a podcast?
(25:49):
And so after we kind of you know, spent some
time explaining what podcasts were, you know, we got into
the project with them again, they they had plenty of stories,
but there there was one mention of a boy that
had died, died hanging when he was at the school.
I remember, I remember distinctly sitting in the meeting with
(26:11):
all these old old Hulclaminum elders and and just some
of the sadness when they talked about that that particular death.
Later on that day I had my first opportunity to
see the site of the old Keueper Island Residential School.
The school closed in nineteen seventy five, and within a
(26:31):
year the people of Pennecticut had made an effort to
not only have it closed, but to have it completely
torn down. And literally within the next couple of years,
they had torn that building to the ground. It was
this gigantic, you know, three story brick monolith that was
(26:52):
standing in the middle of a rainforest. It looked they'd
looked completely out of place, and they did not want
to have that building any more evidence of it. Anyway.
As soon as it was closed, they moved to get
rid of it completely. So it wasn't much left of
the Keeper Island School itself. There's really only just the
(27:13):
stairwell that ran up to the front steps and the
old wharf where where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
Helcamia children had been dropped off by boat to go
to the Keeper Island School. That was really all that
was left of the school. So I met up with
a survivor, Tony Charlie. He invited his brother, who also
(27:34):
attended the school, James Charlie, to take me on a tour.
The reason that I wanted to talk with Tony is
because he had been vocal about sharing his experiences at
the residential school, and I know, I knew that he
had done some healing work, and I wasn't too worried
about unlocking trauma that would set him on a bad path.
(27:57):
I wanted to start that way with someone who had
done some healing already.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
So you met with two survivors in what years were
they at Keeper Island?
Speaker 2 (28:10):
So James and Tony attended Keeper Island School in the
nineteen sixties, and so they are, you know, the silver
haired elders now. But they quite graciously decided to introduce
me to the area and walk me around. The thing
you have to understand about the place the school had
been torn down. But what happened was that this community
(28:31):
kind of got built on top of the old school grounds,
and so where people line up for the ferry every
day was right where the front door of the school was.
And as we were walking along the road, you know,
we walked past and Tony said, oh, yeah, that's where
the gymnasium was, and there was a home sitting there now,
(28:52):
and he said, yeah, that's where the young boy died
when he was hanged. And the mention of this, this hanging,
this suicide as they called it, came up again during
my tour Tony. One of the reasons that I wanted
to visit with Tony was that he had spoken about
hearing that children were burned, that children were taken and
(29:18):
put into the place where they incinerated wood and scraps
from the school, and that he had heard from other
children that there were priests who had taken bodies of
children to be incinerated in the school. And so he
took me to that spot as well, where now there
(29:40):
were just gnarled old apple trees that were left over
from the orchards that used to grow around the school.
It was a shocking kind of tour, I'll tell you, Kate,
because I guess what became really obvious to me was
that every day community members of Penellicate were dry through
(30:00):
this area that had so many bad memories for them.
Their big house, which is their communal gathering place for ceremonies,
was right on the spot that was next to the
gymnasium where Richard Thomas had hung himself. And what they
found was when they were having winter ceremonies and inviting
(30:22):
people from all over Vancouver Island helcamedium people to come
and join them for celebrations and the traditional ceremonies that
they had done since time out of mind, people wouldn't come.
People wouldn't come to Connecticut because they were like, yeah,
I'm not going back to that place because I got
to walk past the place that I remember being dropped
off when I was six years old and all the
(30:43):
things that happened there. And so the school may have
been torn down, but these memories were just visceral and
being revisited upon community members daily every time that they
went down to the ferry.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Tell me specifically well as specific as you feel comfortable
being what Tony and James said they experienced at the school.
So they were there in the sixties, was this an
elementary school for them or were they.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Ten or how old were they? Tony and James initially
started going to the keep Around school as day students.
They were living with their uncle on penellicate and then
they shifted to as they got progressed when went up
in grades, they began going as boarding students. And again
(31:32):
this is where you start to find out some of
the odd ways that families were torn apart because they
were only about eighteen months apart in terms of age,
but they lived on different floors and rarely saw each
other because the older boys were separated from the younger boys,
and they had a sister that was at the school
who they barely knew at all. Because the boys and
(31:54):
the girls rarely interacted. They were completely separated, and so
you could begin to see just how unusual it was
and the deep impacts that it had on families. When
James and Tony told me about the fact that they
had getting to know each other was something that they
experienced in their adult lives, not so much as children,
(32:16):
even though they attended the same school.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
How often did the kids see their parents and did
the parents get a sense for anything being wrong?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Here and again part of The reason that Tony and
James were at the residential school was because their parents
had had a difficult history and Tony and James's mum died.
She had attended to keep her island school as well
and ended up on the streets of Seattle, not in
a good way, I'll put it that way, and she
(32:46):
ended up dying when both of them were young, which
is why he had been why both Tony and James
were living with their uncle and then ended up at
the school, so they had no parents to to tell,
nothing from the uncle. No. One of the important reasons
that I started with Tony, I mentioned that he had
(33:08):
done some healing. He had a lot of healing to
do because he experienced sexual abuse at the hands of
one of the all Blake brothers who ran the school,
and Tony was involved in both civil and criminal cases
(33:29):
that were instrumental in getting that particular all Blake brother
charged and convicted criminally. So Tony had been on a
long journey because he had a lot of pain to
deal with being repeatedly preyed upon and sexually abused by
one all Blake brother. And as I learned, as I
(33:53):
began to know Tony and James Moore. It wasn't just Tony,
it was James as well. And it wasn't just one
all blate brother. There were multiple ob late brothers who
abused the young boys.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So you have a third survivor also, is it Belvy?
Is that how you say?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yes? Bellvy brother?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Was Belvy in their cohort or in a different cohort.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
After our tour, we stopped at the place where the
where the gym used to be and and they, I said,
the elders mentioned this, this boy, you know, hanging what
happened there? And they said, oh, you know, he was
such a happy, happy kid, and we don't know what happened. James,
there's a lot of fire in him. And and and
(34:36):
he said, you know the story that they told about
the way he died, that that was a lie. That
was a lie. They said that he was worried about
his parents and going home, and that's not the truth.
That's all he told me. But it raised questions in
our heads about this boy that had died hanging in
(34:56):
the gym, And so we set out to try to
find any relatives of this boy, Richard Thomas, and we
ended up meeting his sister Bellvy brother. Bellvie is also
a member. She's a Hull Camtum from a different First
nation that's on Vancouver Island, the Hallal First Nation. And
(35:17):
as I said, there were families from up and down
the island that sent their children to go to the
Keeper Island School. Bellvie attended the Keeper Island School a
little bit before. She was a little bit older than
Tony and James. She was there in the late nineteen
fifties and early nineteen sixties, a little bit before Tony
and James, and so we ended up meeting Bellvy and
(35:38):
Bellvie had had just a was I still remember the conversation, Kate.
I mean, it was horrific to hear her own memories
of the sexual abuse that she experienced at the school.
It just seemed like it was completely rampant there. But
also we asked her, you know, about Richard, and she
(36:01):
had this incredible conversation with me. Kate the first time
I met her where she said, I remember Richard phoning
days before he was about to graduate. I remember him phoning,
and they graduated in grade ten. The schools only went
to grade ten at that point. I remember him phoning
in early June morning and saying, I just can't wait
(36:24):
to get out of this hell hole. And she said,
you can't talk that way, Richard. She was she was
a little bit older than him. He was, he was
Bellvy's younger, younger brother. Said you can't talk that way.
And you have to understand, Kate, that in the communities
at that time, the priests they really held, you know,
they held a great deal of power in the community.
(36:48):
They were they were in high esteem because you know,
after decades and decades and decades of missionary work, the
many many many helkamina and people were had converted to
Christian and you listened when the priest spoke. That was
the way up at that time. And so she said
to him, you can't speak that way, and he said,
I'm going to tell everything when I get out of
(37:10):
this hell hole. And then she remembers the phone being
cut off, and apparently at that time it was a
communal phone line, and the word amongst the children was
that the priests and the nuns would listen in when
they tried to phone home, and Bellvy reports that the
phone kind of dropped at that point, and it was
only within a week later that there was another phone
(37:32):
call at Belvy's house, and this time it was the
head of the school who was saying that Richard had
been found dead. So Belvy had always asked questions about
her brother's death. There is no fact, there's no disputing
that Richard was found hanging in the gym. There are
news reports that he had been found hanging, and we
(37:55):
ended up uncovering an on autopsy report as well, which
also can firm that he had been found hanging.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
No other signs of struggle or defense or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
There did not appear to be We took that autopsy
report to an indigenous corner actually, who examined it carefully
for us and said, you know, this isn't how we
would do a coroner's report in this day and age.
It was about two or three pages long, and she said,
if a fifteen year old boy died at school, we
(38:27):
would have, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages.
We would have all kinds of samples and things like that.
She said, there's nothing in this that I can see.
No photographs. They didn't have photographs. There were photographs, yes,
And I'll tell you, Kate, I've been a reporter for
for over two decades, and when I first saw those
pictures it was very difficult to see. I don't know
(38:50):
if you've seen pictures of dead people, but it is.
It's not something you can unsee. It's hard for me
to think about them right now. But the corner looked
at them and said, you know, it does appear to
be consistent with hanging.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Did she talk though, about strangulation and then a hanging
like the possibility that this would be murder that would
give you the exact same results, Patikia everything else that
she's looking at. Was it possible somebody else would have
done this and then hanged them up somehow?
Speaker 2 (39:18):
So the point that you're raising right now is something
that we began to uncover as we spoke to more
and more survivors from Cuper Island about the death of
Richard Thomas. Those kinds of and i'll call them whisperings
had been going on amongst survivors for decades decades. It
(39:39):
happened in nineteen sixty six that Richard Thomas died, but
for decades people had been asking the same questions that
you had. And here's I'll tell you why. One of
the incredible things as we began to reach out to
more and more survivors about Richard Thomas's death, was that
there were lots of people who had witnessed Richard hanging
(40:03):
in the gym. As children, They had witnessed Richard hanging
in the gym, and this was not an uncommon story
where which we heard from multiple people that they had
been taken into the gym by the nuns and priests,
or that they had had access to the gym and
(40:24):
had seen Richard hanging, that Richard had been hanging there
for a period of time, And there were multiple children
that were in the gym and witnessed Richard hanging, and
that seemed to be even more incredible to us that,
you know, it is no doubt that this awful thing happened,
but the fact that there were so many children that
(40:46):
witnessed it seemed very very unusual to say the least,
And imagine the trauma of being a young child and
seeing one of your schoolmates hanging hanging in the middle
of the school gym. But on top of that, the
other thing that became very very i will say puzzling,
to say the very least, is that the autopsy report
(41:08):
showed that police did investigate. It wasn't that it was
swept under the rug or anything like that. Police did
investigate and filed a report and interviewed the oblates, and
they also interviewed three children. The official story that the
oblatees gave was that Richard had been missing from school.
In the morning, he was seen having breakfast. One of
(41:31):
the oblates had left the island to take a group
of children off island for a school trip. The other
oblate was working with another group of children. No one
exactly knew where Richard was, and then suddenly, late and
late in the evening, after the children had gone to bed,
Richard was discovered missing and then found hanging in the gym.
That was the report that the oblates gave to the
(41:53):
police and that the police ended up affirming as the
cause of death. But they also interviewed three children who
said that they had been playing with Richard in the
gym and that he had been playing with a rope
and reading the Bible. That was the story that the
three children shared with the police officers. Two of the children.
(42:16):
We ended up tracking down and trying to find the
children who had supposedly witnessed Richard's death. Two of the
children had passed away, we weren't able to connect with them,
but one of them was still alive and he had
a very different version of events. Certainly, he had been
playing with Richard in the gym, but it was the
children who discovered Richard hanging in the gym after the
(42:41):
lights had gone out mysteriously while they were playing for
a period of time. Donnie Sampson, who was the survivor
who we spoke with, had a very different memory of
Richard's death, And all of the children who witnessed Richard
hanging in the gym, his wife being one of them,
that seemed to be very had been left out of
(43:05):
the official account of the day. So all of these
things were fueling the whisperings i'll call them, the suspicions
amongst survivors over the years about how it was that
Richard had actually ended up hanging and was it possible
that he had been murdered. There was certainly lots of evidence,
(43:28):
and when we begin to get into this in the podcast,
that there was one ob late brother in particular who
had a terrible relationship with Richard Thomas and an ob
late brother who had terrible relationship, as it turns out,
with Tony and James Charlie, who ended up sexually abusing
Tony and James Charlie when he took them away to
(43:49):
his own family home in Montreal in nineteen sixty seven.
So there were lots and lots of uncomfortable and unpleasant
and inconvenient stories that we were hearing from survivors about
Richard's death. That certainly raised a lot of questions about
the way that his death had been investigated. But more importantly,
(44:14):
I guess Kate, they really raised questions about who, if anyone,
was caring for the welfare of these children.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Well, let me ask you what happens after these kids?
And I don't just mean this group of Tony and
James and Bellvy and any of these other kids, but
in general, when they graduate in tenth grade, what happens?
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Where do they end up going?
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Do they get jobs somewhere? Do they go back to
their indigenous communities and reunite with their families?
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yeah, and so again, as I said, the school at
Keuper Island only went to grade ten. Tony and James
ended off ended up going to a different residential school
where they suffered a new set of problems and unpleasantness.
Belvie went on an interesting journey. She said she did
(45:06):
not want to be indigenous. And I keep using the
term Indian because that is the term of the time
and the term, you know, she did not want to
be Indian. She has said, I had nuns, you know,
pulling my hair and saying you dirty Indian, you know,
throughout my entire childhood. And I internalized that and I
(45:27):
didn't want to have anything to do with my family,
or my heritage or my culture. And so she married
a white man. She married a white man so that
she could start to try to turn the page on
just being indigenous at all. As it turned out, that
relationship wasn't a very good one either, where she suffered
a lot of domestic abuse and she began became a
(45:49):
drinker for a period of time. But in both cases
with I told you at the outset that this was
the story of three children, three who survived and one
who didn't. For Belvy, for James, and for Tony, the
school was never far from their memory. I mean it
was not something that they ever felt that as they
grew up into their adult years, it plagued them, you know,
(46:11):
the ripple effect of residential schools began to impact, you know,
the way they worked, the way they loved, the people
who they loved. And so all of them have children,
and we interviewed Belvy's children and James's children, and they report,
(46:33):
you know that, and this is where things become very complicated.
This is where you start to talk about intergenerational abuse
and the things that the priests and nuns did to
the children at the residential schools they ended up perpetuating
on their own children. And so we had a very
gripping and shockingly honest conversation with Fergie Charlie, who was
(46:59):
one of James Charlie these sons, about his father and
being terrified, absolutely terrified of his dad because his dad
had an irrational anger that would explode and he would
take out on his children. Put yourself in the in
the shoes of a young of a young boy, a
young son, not knowing anything about residential schools, not knowing
(47:21):
about what his dad had experienced, that he had been
sexually abused at these places. He didn't know where that
was coming from until his late adult years. And James,
to his absolute credit, you know, when we began to
hear the stories of their children and the challenges that
they faced having relationships with their parents. You know, James
(47:42):
was quite open about that and said, I have done
harm to my wife and to my family, and I
will spend the rest of my life trying to heal
and to help my family, you know, to become whole again.
And so when I when I talked about the goal
of the residential schools being to blow up the family,
(48:05):
that's perhaps the most bitter irony out of all of this, Kate,
is that, yes, the schools operated for a period of time,
but the ripple effects of what the children experience there
are still being felt today in Indigenous communities across Canada
and the United States, and it's being perpetrated by our
own people. The lateral violence that now exists in many
(48:27):
Native American and First Nation communities in Canada often has
its roots in the kind of traumas that children experienced
at residential school whether it's suffering sexual abuse, whether it's
being told that they were dirty Indians, whether it's being
not learning their indigenous languages, being ripped of their mother tongue,
(48:48):
being ripped away from them, and being strapped because they
were speaking their indigenous languages, or whether it's something as
gruesome as seeing a boy hanging in a gym when
you really shouldn't ever be exposed to such a thing.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
How is the Canadian government now today twenty twenty five,
How does the Canadian government view that history? Is it
not embracing the history but accepting it and amplifying it
so people can learn, or do you know where does
the Canadian government stand with this history?
Speaker 2 (49:19):
I think you have to understand that we're a little
bit farther ahead in Canada than perhaps you are in
the United States, although there have been efforts in the
past couple of years to try to try to expose
some of what happened and Indian boarding schools in the
United States, But in Canada, I think the biggest difference
(49:42):
is that residential school survivors, starting in about the early
nineteen mid nineteen nineties, began going to court. And there
are reasons why the federal government, for example, launched the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It wasn't out of some kind
of more benevolence. It wasn't because they thought it was
(50:03):
the right thing to do. It was because it was
court ordered.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Well, yeah, that's usually where things start to move is
court ordered.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
Yes, and so you know that entire investigation and thorough
investigation the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was as a result
of a court settlement between survivors and the Canadian government.
The Canadian government has made many nice noises. Our former
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the Canadian government would
(50:31):
accept wholeheartedly all ninety four calls to action that the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission made in twenty fifteen to fix
things like the justice system, to change the education system,
to deal with our media. For example. There were many,
many recommendations that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made in
terms of the way that Canada needed to change to
(50:54):
move forward. Has the Canadian government made as much movement
as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hoped. Absolutely not. It's
well documented that they've only moved forward on a handful
of the ninety four calls to action. We have a
new Prime minister and we'll see, we'll see whether or
not he's as interested in trying to earnestly move forward
(51:19):
on this project of reconciliation between indigenous peoples in the
Canadian state.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
But how do you take this issue that the Truth
and Reconciliation Committee has brought up all of these points,
the things that need to change. How do you bring
that to the top when in Canada, much like in
the US, there's a struggle over the economy, over industry,
you have a new PM, how do you say this
(51:45):
is important too, because I could absolutely, of course see
this being pushed down, down, down, because there's so much
more you know that seems systemic, and what we're dealing
with in the US and you all are dealing with
in Canada is immediate. It's the economy, it's people paychecks
and everything. So how do you keep that? How do
you advocates keep that at the top of the list?
Speaker 2 (52:06):
So the Keeper Islean podcast has been out for a
couple of years now and people have had an opportunity
to listen to it. So I don't feel badly telling
you about the end of the podcast. It's a bit
of a spoiler alert if you haven't listened to the
Keeper Islean podcast, I'm about to take you right to
the very very end.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
Let me pause by saying to the audience, you need
to listen to this podcast because you know Duncan, and
I cannot do justice to the voices that he has
coming to this to illuminate the story, energize it, and
make you feel, you know, not just the pain, but
hope that happens with this kind of story. So you
(52:45):
can spoil it all you want, it's still a podcast
that needs to be listened to.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
You know, well, thank you, I appreciate those. Those are
very meaningful words, And thank you, I appreciate that. And
we wrap it up with the way that storytellers always
wrap it up. We bring back our or the subjects
who we spent time with, Tony and James and and
and bell Vy, and we tell a little bit about
where they're at and and and that that, you know,
(53:09):
maybe the typical end, you know, ride off into the sunset,
if you will. But Jody, and and and Martha and
I felt that after spending a year going back and
forth to Connecticut and visiting and spending time, what we
began to understand is that we had told the story
of one boy, Richard Thomas, this incredible boy who it
(53:30):
turns out, was not morose and wasn't having suicidal thoughts.
Turned out he was a creative writer who ended up.
You know, we found his published works. For Heaven's sakes,
you know, a boy who had great aspirations actually to
become a priest of all things, which was you know,
unheard of at that time native priests. You know, we
had learned that there was love in this boy's life,
(53:51):
and that his death had caused incredible suffering and pain
to his family, that that touched off sparked all kinds
of misery for for his extended family. We learned an
awful lot about this boy, and we had hoped that
that perhaps that that by by sharing some of his
stories and his family stories, that that people would be
(54:14):
able to picture this, this loss, this you know, that
it wasn't just a black and white archival photo that
we see of, you know, these these dark children in
these in these stiff uniforms, but that maybe we'd be
able to humanize him. As we were trying to figure
out how to wrap this thing up and finish the podcast,
very practical technical kind of you know, thing to do
(54:36):
as a journalist, we went, holy cow, there there are
one hundred and sixty names at Cuper Island who we
have not spent eight episodes investigating. We've only you know
glancingly referred to a few of them. And so Jody
went out to outside of Vancouver along the beautiful sea wall.
(54:59):
And for those of you ever been to British Columbia,
you know, if you go to the Salish Sea, it's
a stunning place. And she explained the project to people
who happen to be just walking along the sea wall
and enjoying the beauty of this land, and she said,
could you just read the names? Read the names of
the children who died at this school, at this place.
And there are one hundred and sixty documented names at
(55:21):
this point, and that list is still growing as they
try to do the archival research and find out who
all the children who died. And so we end the
podcast with this long scroll of people Canadians reading the
names of these deceased children. And I'll tell you we
debated this for a while, Kate, because it's kind of
(55:41):
like going to the Vietnam Memorial. You know, when you
go there, it is it's just a black wall. But
I don't know if you've been, but when I visited
that place, I was staggered. I was staggered by just
that presentation of names. And likewise, I mean, there are
many people. You know, Indigenous people are not the only
(56:03):
people that have experienced the Holocaust, right, I mean, there
are many human beings can be terrible to other human beings.
But this the residential schools, they are our Holocaust in
many ways. And when we heard this list of names
of one hundred and sixty children who died at this school,
when federal officials knew, when church's officials knew, when Canadians
(56:28):
unfortunately should have known, because it was quite public that
children were dying, and nobody did anything. When you hear
these names that go on for five or six minutes,
and Canadians who wanted to do justice, I'll give them
that they wanted. They wanted, they understood the solemnity of
just reading a child's name. You know. Those are children
(56:51):
that never made it home. Those are Indigenous children who
never got to live their dreams. Those are Indigenous children
who never got to have families. And when you hear
that list of names, I'll tell you it's still upset.
It still moves me now thinking about it, because it
(57:13):
just you ask me, you know, what is the Canadian
government doing? I like to turn it around and ask
Canadians now that you know. Now that you know, if
you did not know this history, now that you know,
what are you doing about it? What are you doing
about it? Because we can debate about, you know, political
(57:36):
policy and partisanship and what one party is going to
do with regard to Indigenous relations versus another party, but
at the end of the day, this is going to
be about Canadians and honestly Americans reckoning with this history
and understanding that there is a silence and there has
(57:56):
been an erasure about this history both of our countries
for a reason, and it is having ongoing impacts on
the certainly the health of Indigenous communities in this country,
but on the economies of both of our countries, the
(58:17):
fact that Indigenous people are not fully contributing to it.
And so that's going to end up being on citizens
to start to make a change, and that starts with
it can be low hanging fruit. I don't you know.
It was incredible to me in twenty twenty one to
go down on Canada Day, which is a little bit
(58:39):
like our July fourth or your July fourth, when Canadians
typically put on red and white and go in way
of the flag to see thousands and thousands and thousands
of Canadians putting on orange shirts. Orange has become known
and synonymous with residential school survivors. It was astonishing to
me to go and eat with a bunch of Canadians
(59:02):
walking down and demanding change, demanding that these kinds of
injustices need to be marked and not continue. So change
could happen that way. But we all know that it's
hard to sustain that kind of level of change. But
it also needs to happen just on a simple you
know there's low hanging fruit. You can listen to a podcast.
(59:22):
You could go and follow five Indigenous musicians on your
musical streaming service. You could read a book by someone
like Daniel Telaga, for example. There are all kinds of
Indigenous authors who who will help you understand Indigenous realities
in this country in ways that hopefully will start to improve.
(59:43):
And that was some of the goals of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. I told you that I covered these
stories for years and years. I remember going to a
Truth and Reconciliation Commission event and there were I'm not
kidding you, Kate, there were thousands of children, thousands of
children that attended that event, this very very very upsetting
(01:00:04):
place where survivors were coming to tell their truths, to
tell their stories about the things that happened to them.
And I said to the organizer of the event, why
are there's so many children here, young children? He said,
because we're planting seeds so that the next generation, the
next generation understands that this happened and that they remember it,
and that we begin to start to see change. And
(01:00:27):
I can say now, now I'm a journalism professor, I teach,
and I can say now that fifteen years ago, when
I started teaching and I would talk about residential schools
in the classroom, there weren't any students who really knew
much about residential school and that fortunately has started to change.
That started to change. There are kids books about residential schools.
There are textbooks about residential schools, and I think that's
(01:00:50):
where the hope lies. Okay, you know, if this was
a podcast about three kids who survived and one who didn't,
I think the hope for all of this is that
both Indigenous families start to repair the harm that was
done and start to begin to say I love you.
And that's work that we as indigenous people's need to do.
(01:01:11):
We need to start healing the harms that have been
inflicted upon our families and make our families stronger. And
Canadians need to start saying to their neighbors, I hear you.
You know we don't ignore anymore. I hear you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:38):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis
(01:02:01):
a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(01:02:22):
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at Tenfold More Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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