The last remaining Indian day school classroom on the Saanich Peninsula is coming down.
On Friday, about 250 WSÁNEĆ students, staff and community members gathered around the one-room Tsartlip Indian Day School, next to WSÁNEĆ Leadership Secondary School, for a decommissioning ceremony.
The schoolhouse — believed to be one of the first on-reserve schools in B.C. — was approved for demolition by the WSÁNEĆ School Board in April.
School board vice-chair and Tsawout First Nation elected Chief Abraham Pelkey said the building’s demolition will be bittersweet for many people.
It’s a building that holds much significance for the WSÁNEĆ people, as it was where the SENĆOŦEN Alliance was born and where much of the community’s language revitalization efforts began, he said in an interview.
Joanne Claxton, 91, remembers the building fondly as a place where she and a group of other women successfully turned the federal government away from discontinuing education services in the community in the 1970s.
J,SINTEN John Elliot, 76, said the late Phillip Paul and his late father Dave Elliot helped to refurbish the building and turn it into a language revitalization centre in the 1970s.
“They used this building as a place to begin to take control of our own education system,” he said in an interview with documentarian Benjamin Cran.
Elliot remembers a group of fluent SENĆOŦEN-speaking elders coming into the building to record what they knew of the language so that it could be passed on to future generations.
“They would joke and tease around and tell stories and have tea together,” he said.
More recently, University of B.C. assistant professor and Tsawout Nation member Rob Clifford used the space to teach courses on WSÁNEĆ law.
But for some, it was a place of painful memories that came up every time they drove by 7449 West Saanich Rd.
Angel Sampson, 65, attended Tsartlip Indian Day School from age six to 11.
One of her earliest teachers was someone whom she only knew as Sister Guadalupe, who singled her out for abuse, she said in an interview.
The nun would lock her in a closet, deny her lunch and bathroom breaks, and force her to pray to a mural of the Virgin Mary for her sins, she said.
She said she and other children were sexually abused, including by a doctor during student checkups, and by a nun.
“Then we would just go back to class like nothing happened,” she said.
“I went through such an amazing amount of violence, and those of us that went through those experiences, we never talked. Our parents never knew.”
Sampson said the abuse she endured never broke her spirit.
When she was told to wear formal dress for her confirmation rites at the age of 11, “I went and got a pink sparkly dress and I wore that with pride walking down that stinking church,” Sampson said.
Sampson was one of six plaintiffs named in a landmark class-action suit launched by Indian day school survivors.
The case was settled in 2019.
Since then, the federal government has paid out a $1.47-billion settlement to day school survivors for harms suffered, including payments of up to $200,000 for survivors who experienced physical or sexual abuse.
Not everyone had bad memories of Tsartlip Indian Day School.
Pelkey said his father, Joel Pelkey Sr., had nothing but good things to say about his time at the school and the nuns who taught him.
XEMXIMELEḴ Dan Sam, 88, a former day school student who now sits on the WSÁNEĆ School Board’s elder advisory circle, said the school helped some of his classmates who went on to study at St. Louis College in Victoria.
Some of his former classmates even went on to university, he said in an interview.
“My memory isn’t that good, I’ve been around for a while … but I know in my heart we had a good time here,” he said. “We accepted the teacher and the Father and what they were trying to teach us.”
TELX̱ILEM Curtis Olsen, 71, who attended Tsartlip Indian Day School from Grade 1 to Grade 6, said teachers would punish students if they knew that kids weren’t attending church.
Olsen said the dentist who came to the school was terrifying.
“They used to come and take us out of the classroom, one by one, into the little medical room. And you could hear the drills, and they would do it without freezing or anything,” he said in an interview. “You could hear the drills, and you could hear the kids crying.”
“They’d bring them back into the classroom and [the student] would still be whimpering,” he said. “And of course, everybody’s sitting there wondering who’s going to be next.”
One of his cousins, who attended the day school a few years after him, had all his teeth pulled out, Olsen said.
“I think to some extent they used us to practise,” he said.
To this day, his cousin has a lifelong fear of dentists, Olsen said. “We go for lunch and he has to have soup.”
Another incident, which happened shortly before the school became fully band-operated, involved teachers strip-searching students after fundraising money was believed to have been stolen from the school, he said.
“There was some money in an envelope that was in the principal’s desk and it was in the drawer and the principal thought it went missing,” Olsen said.
The principal strip-searched male students in the classroom and ordered another teacher to strip-search the female students in the bathroom, he said, adding that the students were only 11 or 12 years old at the time.
Furious parents demanded his firing, but the principal was only transferred out to another school, said Olsen, who at the time had just joined the fledgling Saanich Indian School Board.
“There wasn’t really much we could do about it, because the teachers were under the authority of the Department of Indian Affairs,” he said.
In the end, it turned out that the money wasn’t missing at all, he said.
“When the principal opened the drawer, the envelope hooked the top and it got pushed to the back,” he said.
Records retained by the Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs show that Tsartlip Indian Day School opened on June 15, 1900 at the behest of Father Adrian Joseph Vullinghs, who worried about Indigenous children “growing up in ignorance.”
Hiring notices, recommendation letters and income tax-exemption applications show many of the teachers at the 16-seat-capacity schoolroom were nuns.
Reports to Indian Affairs showed that the building was poorly heated, often over capacity and did not have regularly accessible drinking water from 1933 to 1937.
An overflow classroom in a nearby church on West Saanich Road was opened in 1944.
Eventually, another schoolhouse was built — where W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Secondary School is now located — to address overcrowding. That three-room schoolhouse burned down on June 19, 1976. A fire report signed by the late Central Saanich fire chief Bruce Elvedahl said it was a suspected arson. No charges were ever laid.
Sampson said that people who knew what happened kept their mouths shut. “I was really happy to know that none of the kids told who did it, because we never, ever wanted them to be punished for it.”
The remaining one-room schoolhouse is surrounded by newer school buildings that were acquired or built by the W̱SÁNEĆ School Board, which provides K-12 and post-secondary education to the four Saanich Peninsula First Nation communities of Tsartlip, Pauquachin, Tseycum and Tsawout.
The Tsartlip schoolhouse is coming down because it’s in poor condition. What will happen to the site hasn’t been decided yet.
Many students of nearby ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School attended the decommissioning ceremony. Principal SI,OLTENOT Madeline Bartleman said it’s the students’ birthright to witness history. “Fifty years from now, it’s going to be them speaking, and they’re going to say, I remember,” she said in an interview.
Bartleman said teachers take great care when bringing up the subject of day school and residential school to students. “All of our students are still survivors of the intergenerational effects of residential school,” she said.
It’s important to lift up that resilience, she said. “We first want to honour the ones that were before us … all the work that our ancestors did to carry on the language, even through the hardships that they went through.”
The Canadian government estimates about 200,000 Indigenous children have attended federal Indian day schools since the 1920s. More than 20 Indian day schools operated across Vancouver Island and its surrounding islands, including in Fort Rupert, Quatsino, Kyuquot, Nootka, Ahousaht, Opitsaht, Ucluelet, Campbell River, Nanaimo, Ladysmith, Duncan, Tsartlip, Tsawout and Victoria (Songhees).
• The third annual South Island Powwow, marking National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, is on Monday at Royal Athletic Park. Gates open at 10 a.m., the grand entry is at noon. Admission is free.
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