B.C. First Nations man recounts life at Kuper Island Residential School
Published 11:30 am Friday, September 25, 2026
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Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of physical and sexual abuse endured or witnessed by children at Kuper Island Residential School that may be triggering.
It’s a warm, clear day for mid-September, and Vernon Jack sits in dappled sunlight behind his Peninsula home. Moving in formation, a wedge of geese flies overhead, while a kitten hops in circles through a nearby patch of straw-yellow grass. Just out of sight, cars passing along West Saanich Road hum softly.
It was just steps away from this serene spot that, some 76 years ago, the now 81-year-old Elder was taken from his family and Tseycum First Nation home, destined for a place that would offer no safety, peace or tranquility.
And that place was Kuper Island Residential School.
“I went to hell,” he says. “I’ve been there for 10 years.”
Kuper Island Residential School, located on present-day Penelakut Island off the coast of Chemainus, was accessible only by a ferry. Run by the Roman Catholic Church, with funding from the Department of Indian Affairs, it operated for 86 years, between 1889 and 1975. Like similar schools across the country, its goal was to indoctrinate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living.
Jack remembers the day he found out he would be attending the school like it was yesterday.
“I was raised in front of this house,” he says, still sitting in his yard. “A cop got here and that Indian Affairs guy.”
The pair informed Jack’s grandmother that she would be taken to jail if then five-year-old Jack didn’t attend residential school.
“And then that was it,” he adds. “She had to take me to Chemainus, and there we go on a boat.”
In an unfamiliar place, with new faces and routines, those first days on Kuper Island were particularly difficult.
“I didn’t know a word of English,” he says. “I spoke my language, and it took them about two years or so to educate me, I guess they call it.”
Days usually began the same way, with breakfast served in the morning, followed by time spent in classrooms. But sitting behind a desk, Jack was often slapped for as little as a smile.
Meal time was equally difficult. Students were served “very little” and often went hungry, and empty stomachs meant kids were sometimes forced to get creative.
“We used to piss our bed on purpose,” says Jack. “You get a cup, and you just pour it on the bed so we can go out and hang our sheets. Over the fence is some carrots, and we’d jump over there and get some carrots and wrap it up and go back, and then that night we’re eating. That’s how much we starved.”
But it wasn’t just being far from family and hunger that made life on Kuper Island difficult. The residential school, like so many others, was rife with cases of emotional, physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
“I got raped there,” says Jack. “My friends got it bad.”
Jack recalls one day two sisters, who he explains had been raped every night, tried to escape the island by boat.
“They said they couldn’t take it no more, so they went and stole a canoe,” he says. “They got three-quarters of the way, and they tipped over and drowned. Now they’re not suffering anymore.”
There were times students disappeared on the island, too.
“There was kids buried there,” he says, recalling a classmate who went missing. “We got word that he was buried in the furnace downstairs, so we went downstairs, and we started digging until we started bleeding, trying to find his body.”
Data backs up claims from advocates and First Nations groups that deaths did occur there. According to interim findings from archival research released by the Penelakut Tribe in 2025, as many as 171 attendees of the Kuper Island Residential School are known to have died. Of those deaths, 16 are deemed suspicious.
Suffering through all he did, Jack sought help from police, specifically about the rape he experienced at seven years old.
“I went to the cop in Chemainus and said they were doing wrong to me, doing something wrong to my body,” he says. “The principal was in bed with the cops, I guess. They wouldn’t believe me.”
In all, Jack spent 10 years on Kuper Island, coming back to his home on Christmas and summer holidays and then permanently when he was 15 – a return he says felt like “going to heaven.”
Though relieved to be back, the decades that followed proved difficult. Thoughts of the torment he endured remained, and beginning as a teenager, Jack looked to alcohol for relief from those memories.
“That was my best buddy, is that booze,” he says. “It’s really true about becoming an alcoholic – that’s the only thing that’ll listen to us, that would relax me inside.”
And inside, Jack harboured resentment, too.
“I hated white people,” he says. “I hated cops because they wouldn’t even do anything.”
It wasn’t long, though, until Jack found an outlet that helped quell his inner anguish. Canoe trips and soccer, which he played until he was 80, kept his mind “away from all that garbage.”
But it was running, sometimes two or three times per day and many miles at a time, that proved his real outlet.
“I was trying to forget what has happened to us,” he says. “It helped my brain a little bit, and my heart, too. Take a breath, that’s the only way to forget things. And even when you’re running, you’re crying, trying to let it out.”
Advice from Elders, though, helped spur a turning point in Jack’s younger life, when they told him to quit pitying himself for what he lived through.
“That hit me right there,” he says. “So I stopped pitying myself with the help of the Elders.”
Sharing was important, too, explains Jack, adding he was able to lead a life not dominated by thoughts of residential schools “by talking to people that would listen.”
But it wasn’t until his 50s that Jack stopped drinking – a decision that came after his kids asked him why he so often reached for booze.
“I told my family and my grandkids, and they all started crying,” he says, referring to his experiences on Kuper Island. “They didn’t know. I had to share it with them.”
That conversation, and the support he received, was all it took to quit.
As for other residential school survivors struggling to grapple with their past, Jack’s advice is simple: “Share.”
“If you leave things inside you, you get more sick and sick,” he says. “You gotta let it out.”
While Jack has learned to open up and swallow his pity, he explains, “Once in a while, that feeling comes back, and I get low,” adding that forgiveness isn’t something he has considered.
“I can’t forgive because I was innocent,” he says. “But now I’m happy that thing is over.”
Jack has served as Elected Chief for 30 years and is now his community’s Hereditary Chief. He still lives just steps from where his grandmother raised him over seven decades ago.
Sharing these experiences in his yard, the sun laying across his wrinkled face as cars continue to drive past, Jack says that all these decades after leaving Kuper Island, he is proud of the man he has become.