indigenous exploration – Kuper Island Indian Residential School

Kuper Island Indian Residential School podcast project – COL

*I apologize for my parts not sounding the best, as I was home sick and had to do the interview while on call.  

Reflection 

We had dove right into researching for this project, but our strategies we had used for it definitely helped us a lot throughout the researching part of this project, we had noticed that we were able to split the questions evenly so everyone only had about three questions to answer and gather information for. If we all where able to finish our questions and someone else in the group still had some we where able to all help and work together to be able to tackle the question and get it done. The group and I had ran into some problems while doing research for this school, mainly about the documentation of trying to find out how many Indigenous students attended this school as well as the Indigenous tribes that where in the area of the school, nothing had given us a straight answer for either of those questions so we had to dig deep to try and be able to find the answers to the questions that we where trying to answer correctly for this project. But luckily after awhile we had finally found some websites and YouTube videos about the residential school. Another major obstacle that we had to get over was for the recording part of this project that needed to be done, I had fallen ill the day we where suppose to record the podcast part of this project and ended up staying home, but luckily Kaitlyn was able to call me using discord and we where able to record properly together, or at least as properly as you could over a phone call, and surprisingly the amount of time taken to record wasn’t a lot and we where able to finish it pretty quickly.

“How does your artifact tie in with what you have already learned before? How has your thinking changed? What made it change?”

Photo of the Kuper Island Residential School survivor, Eddy Charlie.

With living in Canada and going to a Canadian school you learn quite a bit about the residential schools, starting from elementary school to middle school to high school, but now working on this assignment and actually having to deep dive into the information of the residential schools I realize that they kind of sugar coat it (which I mean, I kind of understand with it being younger kids but I still think they should at least tell us a bit more about them, as this is the history of our country and we need to learn about it, as a lot of it still effects indigenous groups to this day.) They don’t entirely tell you want happened as in the punishments, I knew some of the basics that happened but after this project, I have definitely learned a lot more about them and their horrible history.  I have always thought that everything that happened in Residential schools and what we did to indigenous culture was cruel, but ever since I have had to do more research for the Kuper Island Indian Residential School and finding out more and more, about everything that had happened at the school, how horrible the punishments where, how they where treated, and more had really opened my eyes and helped me actually realize how horrible the schools actually where to the indigenous students who had to attend the schools. This project and the research that I had done and discovered hasn’t really changed my thoughts about residential schools, as I have always thought about them as being cruel and inhumane, but especially learning about the survivors stories that I read and listened through where so horrible and gruesome to listen to, especially when some of the survivors went into detail about everything that happened and they went through at the residential school that they had to attend.

You can go to the website of www.irsss.ca/donate to support the Indian Residential School Survivors Society today.  

Links used for information for this project.

List of Indian residential schools in Canada – Wikipedia.

Kuper Island Indian Residential School – Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelakut_Island.

https://archives.nctr.ca/Kuper-Island-Residential-School.

https://go-gale-com.bc.idm.oclc.org/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=News&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResultsType=MultiTab&hitCount=4&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=3&docId=GALE%7CA673014484&docType=Brief+article&sort=Relevance&contentSegment=ZXAS-MOD1&prodId=CIC&pageNum=1&contentSet=GALE%7CA673014484&searchId=R3&userGroupName=43riss&inPS=true.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kuper-island-joseph-sisters-1.6475691.

Kuper (Penelakut) Island Residential School