10/28/2025
Shared in the words of Cyril Morris, ICLD's Community Relationship Builder:
The Saanich News cover features my mother, sellemah (Joan Morris), speaking about her lived experiences at Kuper Island Residential School and the Nanaimo Indian Hospital.
She shared the atrocities she endured; beatings, starvation, assault, medical experiments, and sexual violence and what she witnessed happening to loved ones.
Many returned home deeply scarred. Others never came home at all.
The interviews took place on Lekwungen Territory, at Cattle Point, in front of the stq'eye sculpture overlooking the Songhees Islands of tl’ces, where she was born and raised. Inside the paper is a QR code linking to a video of her speaking.
In that video, she says, “millions of children did not make it home.” Some questioned or denied her words, but my mother was speaking to all colonial traumas that have impacted First Nations peoples across Turtle Island — from Residential Schools and Indian Hospitals, to the Sixties Scoop and MMIWG.
There is also a painful connection between Kuper Island and Nanaimo Indian Hospital. Many children sent from Kuper were so badly injured that they were hospitalized — and then experimented on. My mother called those hospital stays a “reprieve,” because it meant she could see her own mother, who was a patient there for 18 years.
These stories are not easy to tell — but they are the truth. Sharing them helps ensure that what happened is never forgotten.🧡
