Sixty years had passed before police in B.C. took a second look at the stories of sexual abuse shared by a group of runaways from Kuper Island Indian Residential School.
The six young Indigenous boys were reported missing from the notorious institution at 11:30 p.m. on January 8, 1939. They’d taken canoes to escape across the water to their family homes near the town of Chemainus on Vancouver Island.
The now-defunct British Columbia Provincial Police opened an investigation into the students’ claims, but after two Catholic clergy were transferred out of province and one staff member was dismissed, no charges were laid.
For a very long time, it looked like the story was finished. But at the end of the century, the RCMP Native Indian Residential School Task Force reopened the 1939 case file.
This new crop of investigators smelled a cover-up.
“The decision not to charge is difficult to understand,” Cpl. Michael Wayne Pacholuk wrote in his final report for the task force. “A 1999 file review by both the task force and Crown counsel established that the B.C. Provincial Police had gathered more than enough evidence to obtain a charge approval, even by today’s more stringent standards.”
By then, however, little could be done in the Kuper Island case and several others where residential school officials may have taken criminal steps to conceal evidence of child sexual abuse.
“Unfortunately, the principal or other staff members who were the subject of the provable complaints are in each case deceased and cannot be prosecuted,” Pacholuk wrote.
The officer’s apparent frustration with the lack of consequences for the Kuper Island abusers and those responsible for the cover-up has come to light for the first time through the IJF’s reporting on the task force’s final report.
The task force led Canada’s first and only province-wide investigation into abuses at residential schools, and its work has been linked to sex crimes charges against 14 men. The final report details the teams success’s and shortcomings, along with the many obstacles it faced, including budget cuts, obstruction by government and churches, poor morale and sloppy police work by some officers.
Survivors have also spoken to the IJF about how the task force investigations affected their lives and quests for justice.
Taken together with historical records about Kuper Island in the IJF’s residential schools database, the task force’s final report paints a picture of a system where shielding abusers from consequences was more important than protecting the children in their care.
Staff Sgt. Ron Palta, a major crimes investigator with the B.C. RCMP, said the outcome of the 1939 investigation at Kuper Island feels sadly typical for case files involving crimes at residential schools.
“It’s certainly ringing a bell with some of the themes and accusations that I've seen,” he told the IJF. “Back in that time, we see the efforts by the churches or other bodies to move individuals before they can be investigated.”
‘In self defence he lies’
The disturbing stories of sexual assault at Kuper Island were recounted in detail in a CBC podcast, including allegations that a staff member threatened to throw a child from a boat into the water if he didn’t submit to the abuse.
A school narrative for Kuper Island in the IJF’s database shows how the boys’ claims they were “harshly treated” first reached the federal government six days after the escape. By that time, the police investigation was already underway.
Weeks later, a parallel investigation would be ordered by the Indian Affairs Branch to be conducted by Major D.M. McKay, the Indian commissioner for B.C.
McKay’s report was submitted on April 19, 1939. In it, he dismissed the idea that children had run away from Kuper Island because they were abused.
“One of the most serious consequences of truancy is that in self defence he lies to his parents and falls into other forms of dishonesty. … My considered opinion is that in the main the truancy at Kuper Island School could be attributed very largely to a desire for a larger freedom, excitement and change, rather than to harsh and cruel treatment by the school staff,” McKay wrote.
That explanation, he went on, applied to the disappearance of the six boys earlier that year.
His report goes on to undermine the police investigation into the boys’ claims, stating that “most of the evidence obtained of alleged immoral practices would be of very doubtful evidence, should the police decide to prosecute.”
McKay justified the decision to move two Catholic priests out of the province, citing the “considerable unrest and excitement” among the Indigenous community in the area and the need to increase attendance at the school.
Six decades later, after the RCMP task force had taken another look at the police case files, Pacholuk pointed out that McKay had “insisted there was no evidence to support any of the allegations, despite his having seen several detailed statements to the contrary.”
Pacholuk’s final report noted that there was no evidence that the accused clergymen had ever faced any discipline for what happened at Kuper Island.
“The decision to transfer the suspected clergy members was made by both the Church and the Indian Agent for the stated purpose of restoring community confidence in the school. A more cynical view is that the suspects were transferred to keep them out of the reach of police authorities and thus avoid charges,” he wrote.
That same pattern continued for the life span of Canada’s residential school system.
The task force took note of a handful of cases at other B.C. institutions where school principals had ignored children’s complaints about sexual misconduct by staff members. Decades later, the same staff members would be convicted of child sex abuse.
In another case, a staff member at the Alberni residential school caught a staff member in bed with a naked child. While the worker was informing the school’s principal, the supervisor packed up his bags and fled.
“Despite this credible evidence, [the principal] took no action and failed to even make a notation of the incident in the supervisor's personnel file,” Pacholuk wrote.