There are not many photographs of school children at Kuper Island Residential School, but there were many formal portraits of the school bands. Children stood ramrod straight posing for the photographs. The schools showed off the bands as a way of showing the general public the good works at the schools. It was part of the program of propaganda. Propaganda Canadian style. The media ate it up and fed it to the Canadian public without any critical thought to what was happening. The media like the rest of us were blissfully ignorant. But they helped spread the government’s message about how lucky the young Indian children were to be going to Montreal from Kuper Island British Columbia on a trip with their band.

As Duncan McCue the host of the CBC podcast pointed out,

“The media was complicit in helping to manufacture support for residential schools. In one feature the missionaries are portrayed as fighting an uphill battle in their efforts  to educate children because ‘as soon as a boy or girl returns to a home environment they lose all ambition, and initiative, reverting to the reserve to become drunks.’ Though the reporter does acknowledge there was a certain prison atmosphere to Kuper Island.”

This propaganda showed the public what great things the churches and government were doing for the benefit of Indians. Who could not be impressed? Especially when young children who had often never been away from their home reserves went to big cities like Montreal. Imagine that! What a thrill that must have been for the Indigenous kids.

The bands from Kuper Island residential school played all over Vancouver Island and even the mainland. Every Remembrance Day and many other events throughout the region had a band from that school. Canadians responded enthusiastically to those bands.

Remarkably, Father Brian Dufour, an Oblate brother from Kuper Island Residential school,  hatched a plan to take the band to perform at Expo 67. I remember as a young lad recently graduated from High School I drove to Montreal for that festival with a bunch of friends. We were also incredibly excited by that. I sadly, don’t remember if I heard that band or not. We did hear musical performances. The only band I remember was a group called Three’s a Crowd. My friends and I were much more interested in drinking at bars and looking for young ladies. The bars were illegal for us, but that did not stop us. The girls largely and sensibly  ignored us rubes from the prairies.  We had a lot of fun. We were not concerned about “Indians”. We were pitifully ignorant.

Tony Charley was invited to join the band and got to go on this exciting trip to Montreal, the largest city in Canada at the time. For the big trip to Expo the children were dressed up in Hollywood “Indian” garb-buckskin and feathers. It did not matter to anyone that it looked nothing at all like traditional west coast regalia. After all, it was all a show wasn’t it?

But the kids were a hit at Expo, led by the charismatic Father Brian Dufour. The school raised more than $10,000.

Everyone was happy. Well, most were happy. Mayor Drapeau welcomed them to Montreal. It was a place for mutual understanding and peace Drapeau said.

Tony and his brother James were invited by Brother Dufour to stay an extra month. What lucky guys. It was a surprise and they jumped at the chance. They had no parents to ask for permission. In other words they were the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. They just agreed to stay with Brother Dufour into August. August was when I arrived with my buddies in Montreal. I often wonder if we somehow crossed paths.

Brother Dufour asked James to sleep with him one night and Tony the next. They were very inexperienced young boys. Tony was about 15 years old. His brother James was younger. Each of the boys confided to the other that Brother Dufour did “funny things to them at night.”  They did not know what they meant, but both were very uncomfortable with what happened.

Brian Dufour was actually pretty young at the time as well. He was well thought of as a devoted young Christian working hard to better “Indian” children.  According to the CBC podcast, Dufour’s parents were very proud of their son and his work, but they did not know that he would visit boys in their bedrooms during the night to sexually abuse them. After all his parents were good Catholics and thought their son was as well.

Dufour was grooming the boys. That expression was not known in 1967. At the end of the summer, Brian Dufour was transferred to another residential schools and wrote a public letter saying how much he would miss the children of Kuper Island.

Of course, the troubles for Tony and James did not end there. Dufour was gone, but there were other predators in the residential school and they were vulnerable. The propaganda paved the way for the abuse.