Qualla: St. Augustine's Indian Residential School

St. Augustine's Indian Residential School: Introduction

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The building is gone. The last physical remnants of St. Augustine's Indian Residential School were burned in 2008, and where classrooms and dormitories once stood in Sechelt, the shishalh Nation has built its administrative and cultural center. The tems swiya Museum now occupies ground that, for seventy-one years, served a very different purpose. This is a story about what happened on that ground, and about what the shishalh people chose to put there after.

St. Augustine's Indian Residential School: Seventy-One Years

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

St. Augustine's opened in 1904, less than a quarter mile from Sechelt's commercial center, and operated until 1975. The Sisters of the Instruction of the Child Jesus managed the school for its first two decades, and members of the order remained until its closure. From 1924 to 19...

St. Augustine's Indian Residential School: The Children Who Did Not Come Home

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2021, Chief Darren Blaney of the Homalco First Nation spoke publicly about what his community had long known: children sent to St. Augustine's did not all return. "There's a whole generation of Homalco people who didn't come home from that residential school," he said. "They'r...

St. Augustine's Indian Residential School: From Ashes to Culture

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The decision to burn the last remains of the school building in 2008 was deliberate. What replaced it was equally intentional. The shishalh Nation built its governance headquarters on the site, along with the tems swiya Museum, which preserves and celebrates shishalh culture, lan...

St. Augustine's Indian Residential School: Faces in the Story

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among the students who passed through St. Augustine's was Pat John, born in 1953, who went on to play Jesse Jim in the long-running CBC television series The Beachcombers for nineteen years. John became one of the most recognizable Indigenous actors in Canadian television history...