For decades, a four-storey red-brick building loomed on a hillside above Alert Bay, visible from the water, impossible to ignore. Former students who returned to Cormorant Island as adults described the physical reaction of seeing it -- the tightening in the chest, the memories it forced back to the surface. St. Michael's Indian Residential School operated from 1929 to 1974, housing up to 200 Indigenous children at a time, and its presence continued to traumatize long after its doors closed. In February 2015, the 'Namgis First Nation hosted a healing ceremony and the building came down. What it represented, however, demands remembering.
The first residential school in Alert Bay was built in 1882. St. Michael's replaced it in 1929, constructed by the federal Department of Indian Affairs at a cost of about $250,000 -- a substantial investment in a remote island community accessible only by boat. Operated by the Anglican Church, the school drew Indigenous children from a vast stretch of British Columbia's coast: from Campbell River in the south to Prince Rupert in the north, from Bella Bella and Bella Coola to the Nisga'a territories and Haida Gwaii. Children as young as five or six were removed from their families and communities, sometimes for years at a stretch. With capacity for 200 students, St. Michael's was the largest residential school the Anglican Church operated in Canada.
Inside St. Michael's, children were prohibited from speaking their own languages. Kwak'wala, Heiltsuk, Nisga'a, Haida -- the words that connected them to their families and nations were treated as offenses to be punished. The goal was explicit. In 1934, the Indian Residential School Commission of the Missionary Society of the Church of England published a report thanking "Almighty God for what has been accomplished: for a race of people brought in the shortest period of time known in history from the most debasing savagery to citizenship." That language -- savagery, citizenship -- reveals the thinking that drove the system. Indigenous cultures were not different; they were obstacles to be destroyed. The school sat adjacent to the U'mista Cultural Centre, which would eventually house the potlatch regalia that the federal government had seized from the Kwakwaka'wakw in 1921. The proximity was bitter and fitting: the instruments of cultural destruction and cultural survival, side by side on the same small island.
In the early 21st century, Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated claims of physical and sexual abuse at St. Michael's and schools across the country. Survivors came forward with testimony about what they had endured as children. The commission awarded compensation to complainants, but for many, no amount of money could address what had been taken -- years of childhood, connection to family, fluency in a mother tongue, trust in the adults who were supposed to protect them. The school building stood through all of it, empty since 1974 but refusing to disappear. For survivors living in Alert Bay, it was a daily reminder occupying the hillside above their community.
On February 18, 2015, church leaders, politicians, Assembly of First Nations representatives, and former students gathered on Cormorant Island. The 'Namgis First Nation hosted a healing and cleansing ceremony to mark the beginning of demolition. The Canadian government contributed $1.8 million for the demolition and site remediation -- the building contained asbestos and lead paint, hazards layered on top of the deeper harm it represented. The teardown took months, not a single dramatic collapse but a careful dismantling. Survivors described the removal as the closing of a dark chapter. The hill where St. Michael's stood is now open ground. The building is gone, but the U'mista Cultural Centre next door remains, still displaying the masks and regalia that survived the potlatch ban, still teaching the languages the school tried to erase.
Located at 50.59N, 126.94W on Cormorant Island, off Vancouver Island's northeast coast. The former school site is on a hillside in the northern part of Alert Bay, now cleared ground adjacent to the U'mista Cultural Centre. From altitude, Alert Bay appears as a narrow village along the southern shore of a small island in the Inside Passage channels. Nearest airport with scheduled service is Port Hardy (CYZT), approximately 45 km northwest. Port McNeill ferry terminal is visible on Vancouver Island to the south.