The school stood on Flores Island, south of the Ahousaht community, on land owned by the Women's Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church. In 1904, the federal government funded the transition from a day school to a residential facility under the supervision of Reverend J.C. Butchart. The shift from day school to residential school was the critical change -- it meant children would no longer return home each evening but would live at the institution, separated from their families, their language, and the cultural practices that had shaped Ahousaht life for generations. The five chiefs who protested understood exactly what was at stake. Their petition went to a government that had designed the system to do precisely what the chiefs feared.

The original school building burned down in 1916. Indian Affairs official P.B. Ashbridge attributed the fire to faulty wiring -- a cause that should have surprised no one, given that multiple prior inspection reports had flagged the facility as being at risk. A day school program filled the gap until a new building with capacity for 25 students was constructed. But the replacement fared no better in inspectors' eyes. A 1937 report called the building a 'fire trap,' using the same blunt language that had described its predecessor. The pattern was consistent across the residential school system: warnings were documented, filed, and ignored while children continued to live in buildings that their own government's inspectors deemed dangerous.

The school operated until 1940 and has since been documented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation as part of the broader accounting of the residential school system in Canada. In 2021, following the discovery of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, Ahousaht announced plans to search the grounds of their own former school for unmarked burials. Capital Daily reported that 202 children are known to have died in Vancouver Island residential schools across the system. Each number represents a child who was taken from a community like Ahousaht and never returned home.

As of March 2021, the Ahousaht First Nation was building a wellness centre on the grounds where the residential school once stood. The choice of that specific site is deliberate. Where the government once built an institution to separate children from their families and strip away their culture, the Ahousaht are building a place dedicated to healing the intergenerational trauma that separation caused. The five chiefs who petitioned the government in 1904 did not stop the school from operating, but their resistance was recorded -- an early, documented act of opposition to a system that would not be formally acknowledged as harmful for another century. The wellness centre is, in a sense, the answer to their petition: not from the government that ignored them, but from the community that survived.