‘There’s a lot of history … good and bad’

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This article was published 27/06/2015 (3745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — Anyone with $79,000 can own a former Manitoba residential school in Birtle.

Property taxes are a pittance; the 26-acre property is set high on rolling hill country with a 100-foot frontage along a heavily treed creek. Tonnes of brick can be sold off for salvage, along with copper fixtures and other building materials.

That’s according to an ad posted on Kijiji, one of the world’s largest Internet classified platforms. The current owner of the former Birtle Indian Residential School has marked the property price as “reduced.”

In the wake of the recently released Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, critics on social media have called the sale of any residential school disrespectful.

“Outrageous,” read one Facebook post.

The owner who put the school up for sale says he’s just being practical.

Local real estate agents turned down the listing so he took to the Internet, posting a few archival photos and writing up the listing for free on Kijiji, he said.

The Birtle School opened in the 1880s as part of a Presbyterian mission and operated for many decades. It closed in 1970 after the church handed over the property to Ottawa, which subsequently sold it to a private owner.

Thousands of children from across the Prairies attended Birtle during its long history, but perhaps its most famous student was the late Manitoba aboriginal leader Elijah Harper.

It’s once-grand building is now in a state of disrepair. Years of vandalism and exposure have turned parts of the interior into rubble, and its outbuildings are barely visible anymore.

Birtle is one of 15 former residential schools in Manitoba and among 140 recognized across Canada. Apart from the former schools in Portage la Prairie and Winnipeg, few have been repurposed in this province.

An Assembly of First Nations project to commemorate the locations ran into red tape beginning with title searches. The national aboriginal lobby group instead sent out 139 commemorative markers to nearby communities because they couldn’t find all the owners of the former residential schools.

The current owner, in a phone interview from Salmon Arm, B.C., said he doesn’t want to be publicly identified as the owner of a former residential school. He believes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission got only half the story and skewed Canadian history by focusing on accounts of assimilation, abuse and mistreatment from the residential school era.

“I can see some of the things I’ve said will set me up as a target for people who want to believe only the worst. If you don’t put my name in it, I appreciate it,” he said.

History aside, Kijiji seemed the best place for the ad, said the owner. It was also the only online site with a window on a worldwide market.

“We were out in Manitoba last summer and I met a realtor there to look at listing it and the realtor was a little overwhelmed. They didn’t know how to come up with a value on it.”

The ad has drawn two offers but both were under the asking price and he turned then down. One was from Switzerland and those prospective buyers made the trip to Birtle, only to back out when they saw how much work the property required.

The owner said he bought the place in 1995 from the only other private owner of the school. He and his family renovated the former principal’s residence and moved in for eight years before leaving for good.

He said he sees no point in perpetuating the history of the place.

“It’s an absolute gorgeous property. We obviously didn’t buy it for the history,” he said.

“I’m the second owner since. I thought I could put it into productive use again. That’s why I started to take it down. I wanted to get rid of the history, because there’s so much negative connotation there. But I didn’t have the resources. Or the time,” he said.

Waywayseecappo elder James Cote, who spent 10 years at the Birtle residential school, sees the Kijiji ad as evidence of a sad fate in store for the school.

“It’s just I know it will get into the wrong hands in time. It’ll be destroyed, that’s what I’m saying,” said Cote, who is on council at Waywayseecappo, about 50 kilometres north of Birtle.

Cote described a love-hate relationship with the school. He loves its dilapidated beauty, its location at the highest point overlooking Birdtail Creek and the town of Birtle.

Both parents were also survivors; his father was among the work crew of teenage boys kept back in the summer of 1930 to lay bricks for the school that’s now crumbling into the ground.

“My dad was 15 years old that time. He said ‘I was one of the boys who weren’t sent home: All summer we built that school … worked from daylight to night building that school,’” Cote said.

Cote’s dad and the other boys left behind a memory capsule, an old glass bottle with their names and messages, something nobody’s ever retrieved, Cote said.

“There’s never any mention of them,” he said.

At the same time, the intent of the schools, to assimilate aboriginal people, still hurts him.

“I didn’t believe in the Truth and Reconciliation (Commission) book at all,” he said of the report released with national fanfare weeks earlier.

“I threw mine in the garbage. That’s how much anger and hatred I still have with the residential school system. I was part of it for 10 years and it destroyed me as a human being for many years,” Cote said.

Still, Cote said he and other survivors who haven’t died believe Birtle Indian Residential School deserves to be remembered.

Cote and others held annual feasts and ceremonies once a year on the former grounds for years, he said.

“There’s a lot of history in that place, good and bad,” he said.

They tried to interest federal and provincial politicians in a heritage building grant to preserve it but got nowhere, Cote said.

He just wishes the fate of the school wasn’t left to Kijiji.

“I’m trying to preserve the building and put a big sign that says this is where so many students went to school. Keep the yard clean and board up the doors so no young kids can go in there. Preserve it. That’s my dream,” Cote said.

» Winnipeg Free Press