Qualla: Piers Island

Piers Island: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arrecifazo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Piers Island covers less than a square mile. There are no public roads on it, no cars to speak of, and the way across is a small boat. For three years in the 1930s, this small piece of ground held a federal penitentiary containing more than six hundred people - men and women whose criminal offence had been to take off their clothes in public as an act of religious protest. Nothing on the island today announces that. It is one of the strangest and least-visited chapters in British Columbia's history, and it happened within sight of the Swartz Bay ferry terminal.

Read more: Piers Island on Qualla

Image: Arrecifazo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piers Island: A Surgeon's Name on the Chart

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The island sits in Satellite Channel, the passage that links Saanich Inlet in the west to Colburne Passage and Haro Strait in the east. Haro Strait carries the Canada-United States border here, separating British Columbia's Gulf Islands - of which Piers is one - from Washington's...

Read more: Piers Island on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Piers Island: A Protest Without Clothes

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arrecifazo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Doukhobors were Russian pacifist Christians who came to Canada at the end of the nineteenth century to escape persecution, many of them settling eventually in the Kootenays as the communal Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood. Within that population, a smaller faction...

Read more: Piers Island on Qualla

Image: Arrecifazo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piers Island: Party by Party

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arrecifazo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The answer was to build a penitentiary from scratch, in the summer of 1932, on an island nobody else was using. Prisoners arrived from the Kootenays across the second half of that year in a series of escorted parties: a first group of twenty men on August 11, further contingents ...

Read more: Piers Island on Qualla

Image: Arrecifazo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piers Island: The Children Left Behind

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arrecifazo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The heaviest cost was not paid on the island. With both parents imprisoned in many households, more than 350 Doukhobor children were separated from them - 119 placed in foster homes by the Children's Aid Society of Vancouver, others sent to orphanages and industrial schools. Otta...

Read more: Piers Island on Qualla

Image: Arrecifazo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piers Island: Golf Carts and Quiet

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arrecifazo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The prison came down and the island went on to a very different life. Today Piers Island holds about 131 private properties strung along a dirt loop road and a web of walking trails, with no bridge, no causeway, and no public road access at all. Residents get across on a foot fer...

Read more: Piers Island on Qualla

Image: Arrecifazo | CC BY-SA 3.0