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Kuper Island · CBC

E3: Sink or Swim

May 31, 2022·36 min·3 clips
Belle V. Thomas, 11, is pushed into the ocean by a nun who says she'll either sink or swim.
A tall wooden wharf comes first. Belle V. Thomas is 11 in 1958, called down by a nun at the Cuper Island Indian Residential School while the ocean waits below. The instruction is simple on paper: anyone who cannot swim has to step forward. In her memory, it lands as fear and control. Then the episode turns to the archive. After months of requests, the team reaches a Truth and Reconciliation Commission record tied to a 1939 police investigation into the school. Six boys had run away. They left around eight in the evening, took two canoes, and got home safely before a constable found them. That part was familiar. What was less expected was that the constable asked why they had fled instead of only sending them back. The boys said conditions were bad. One described fear of a redacted person identified in the transcript as a father or priest, and the report points toward sexual abuse without softening what is being described. Their parents refused to send them back. The report says fathers were extremely upset, and one man threatened violence if his children had drowned. Then the file turns ugly in another way. After recording that fear and anger, it still reduces one father through a racist official judgment. The episode treats the document with care. It is not a solved mystery. It is a brief record of children being heard inside a system built to ignore them. Credits, survivor thanks, and crisis-line information keep the ending grounded.

As heard by us

A stark account of children, archives, and the fear inside the school.

A child on the Kuper Island wharf is told to step forward because she cannot swim, and that scene gives the episode its hardest emotional hit.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a wharf scene at Cuper Island that opens into an archival reckoning.

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