BY PHIL VERNON
Special to the Driftwood
“Some people can talk about their residential school experience. Others may be willing to tell their story one day. Then there are those, like me, who will take it to their graves.”
I was speaking with Mike Charlie at the Fernwood Road Café about six years ago. Mike was chair of the Penelakut Sulxwe’en Elders Group, whom Chris Marshall of the Salt Spring Archives and I had invited over to discuss the creation of Indigenous signage at the Fernwood dock.
A key question for the signage was whether to include the residential school story on a panel, so I asked Mike.
“It was bad,” he said. “Kids died there.”
Mike’s father was W̱SÁNEĆ, his mother Penelakut. He and his brothers had been living in Washington state when their mom’s sister called them home to Penelakut — to Kuper Island as it was called then — when their mom wasn’t well enough to look after them. As soon as the kids got there, they were sent to the Kuper Island Industrial School, an imposing two-storey brick building overlooking the bay.
I’d first met Mike some years before, on a visit to Penelakut. We were just leaving when a voice called out, “Hi!” I turned and there was this guy looking up with an irrepressible grin. “I’m Mike,” he said, and shook my hand. That was all; I left and filed away his creased, crumpled — yet bright — face in my brain.
It wasn’t until that day in the Fernwood café, and subsequent conversations with Mike about the residential school and his passion to honour those who didn’t come home, that I began to appreciate Mike more deeply. Never marrying, he was dedicated to his community, a good uncle to his brothers’ children and soccer coach to all the kids on Penelakut.
As the Indigenous Signage Project inched forward through COVID shutdown, cancelled meetings and funerals, Mike kept alive our collaborative process. Despite his own health struggles, he was determined that we’d finish the panels.
During the project’s final year the news broke about the unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School, followed immediately by Penelakut revealing they’d already documented more than 160 graves next to the site of the demolished Kuper Island Industrial School. In the flurry of news reports and interviews, the Sulxwe’en met and Myrus James suggested a March for the Children.
As chair of the Elders Group, Mike took on organizing the event, connecting with First Nation communities up and down Vancouver Island where kids had been taken and sent to Kuper Island, getting hundreds of orange T-shirts printed and even dying his own hair orange.
When over 1,500 people showed up that August day in 2021, a veritable sea of orange washing up the hill to Waterwheel Park, everyone including Mike was stunned — they’d never imagined such a turn-out. Salt Spring Islanders were there in force to listen to the stories and show support, and we’ve continued every year since.
Sadly, Mike never saw the completion of the signage project. That winter he entered hospital with complications of kidney disease; while there he contracted COVID and died.
Those of us who worked with Mike will never forget him — his jokes, his warmth and infectious spirit.
Mike’s commitment to helping strengthen his people’s culture extended beyond this life, making final arrangements before his death for a traditional service and burial.
At the graveside after the service, I watched the men of the community lining up to take turns with the shovel to cover the coffin and slowly fill the grave. Towards the end I stepped up too. I thought of the day I first met Mike. What I saw then in his face, I came to know: a fire, brightly burning, for truth and for justice.
This Monday, Aug. 4, is the fifth annual March for the Children. What does it mean? To me, it means standing with those whose brothers, sisters and cousins never came home. It means standing with survivors and their families across Canada, those who lost their childhoods, their languages and cultures. Those forever marked by their experiences, who struggle every day to stop the cycle of violence in their families and communities.
I know how much it means to them for non-Indigenous people like me to listen to their stories, to bear witness to the terrible legacy of our governments’ racist policies and, finally, to acknowledge that things have yet to be made right.
The Penelakut People invite you to join them on their unceded territory and traditional village of Sunuwnets (Chemainus), meeting at 8:30 a.m. at the Salish Sea Market/Chemainus ferry terminal. For those unable to participate in the march, go directly to Waterwheel Park for prayers, dances and testimonials.