CANADA
Comox Valley Record
Erin Haluschak
Record Staff
St. Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay, B.C. — one of five remaining residential schools in the province — is slated for demolition later this year. This is the first of a three-part February series looking further into the stories of the students, challenges faced by local First Nations in the Comox Valley today, and a special mid-month ceremony at the school to acknowledge the past and ignite hope for the future.
Evelyn Voyageur remembers her mother coming home in tears.
She was nine years old, living on Gilford Island when she was told she had to leave to Alert Bay to attend St. Michael’s Residential School.
“You have to go to the school or you’ll be taken away from us forever, or we’ll go to jail,” she recalls her mother saying.
The next day, she was placed on a water taxi.
Voyageur, who now lives in the Comox Valley, has gone on a healing journey, but says she has absolutely no recollection of the approximately 30-kilometre trip from her home to the school.
“I try to bring it up in my memory, but it must have been so traumatic,” she says. “Ten of us were on that taxi.”
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