If you’re planning a trip to Cranbrook, British Columbia, don’t miss St. Eugene Resort. It’s a destination blending natural beauty with cultural and historical teachings. Robin and Arlene Karpan return with another captivating guide, exploring the resort’s unique transformation from a former residential school to a vibrant centre for Indigenous culture, history, and renewal.
St. Eugene Resort near Cranbrook, British Columbia, offers one of the most powerful yet surprising Indigenous cultural travel experiences in Canada. The setting is not one we might expect – a former Residential School. Elsewhere in the country, Indigenous groups have been anxious to get rid of these reminders of a painful past. The people of the Ktunaxa Nation took a different approach, transforming the most hated symbol of their recent past into a positive driver of cultural and economic revival.
The philosophy of St. Eugene Resort is best summarized by Elder Mary Paul’s quote framed in the hotel lobby: “Since it was within the St. Eugene Mission School that the culture of the Kootenay Indian was taken away, it should be within that building that it is returned.”
Getting to St. Eugene Golf Resort
The St. Eugene Golf Resort is a 10-minute drive north of Cranbrook, close to the junction of Highway 3 running through southern BC, and Highways 95 and 95A heading north to Kimberley, Invermere, and eventually Golden and the Trans Canada Highway. It is only about five minutes from the Canadian Rockies International Airport, where guests can take a shuttle directly to the resort.
The stately ivy-covered stone and brick former mission school building stands at the end of the tree-lined entrance amid vibrant flower gardens. The resort complex lies in a green valley next to the banks of the St. Mary River, with a Rocky Mountain backdrop.
With the former mission school as its centrepiece, the resort offers 125 guestrooms and suites, plus an RV park. The three restaurants range from fine dining in the Numa Restaurant to more casual fare in the 19th Hole Bar & Grill at the golf course and another full-service eatery in the Casino of the Rockies. The St. Eugene Golf Course, designed by famous golf course architect Les Furber, ranks as the resort’s star attraction.
The Storied Past of the St. Eugene Mission
We can experience St. Eugene Resort on different levels. For many guests, it’s primarily a place to unwind, play a few rounds of golf on the championship course, enjoy a prime rib dinner, and relax in comfortable digs that rival any luxury hotel. It excels simply as a resort experience.
Or we can go a step further and learn the rest of the story. Why was this place built? What really happened here? How did the most despised institution in the region become adopted by the very people that it exploited?
On arrival, we’re immediately struck by the attractive setting that outshines its dark past. One hint that this is not your average resort is a sculpture among the flower gardens. It portrays a young Indigenous girl and boy with cropped hair holding hands, with sad faces that seem to be saying “Why am I here?”
Exploring the Ktunaxa Interpretive Centre
To learn more, we paid a visit to the Ktunaxa Interpretive Centre on the resort’s lower level. The centre’s guide, Maren, gave us an orientation to Ktunaxa culture and history, from the fascinating Creation Story involving larger-than-life creatures to displays of artifacts, including feather headdresses, pine needle baskets, fish traps, and compact tipis that are easy to roll up for transport.
Centred in the Kootenay Rockies of BC, the Ktunaxa territory extends north to the Yellowhead Pass, south to the northern parts of Montana, Idaho, and Washington, and into western Alberta.
The Ktunaxa language is known as an “isolate” with no relationship to any other language, even to other nearby Indigenous languages. The number of people speaking it wasn’t large to begin with. Indigenous languages were forbidden in residential schools, so they soon became critically endangered.
That’s starting to change, however, with the place that suppressed it now playing a major role in its revival. The language is once again being taught and embraced by a new generation. Guests at the resort see Ktunaxa everywhere with a lot of bilingual signs. Each of the 18 holes on the golf course has a Ktunaxa name, along with its meaning and translation.
Transforming the St. Eugene Mission School
Although the mission school started in this area in the late 1800s, the current building was opened in 1912 and operated by Catholic orders until it closed in 1970. The injustices and abuses of the residential school system were widespread throughout the country, including here.
“Some people had a bad time at school, some not so bad, and some won’t even talk about it. Each was different,” Maren explained. “My grandmother said that her time here was very lonely because when she looked out the window, she could see her home, but she knew she couldn’t go home.”
After the school closed, the provincial government planned to turn the building into a psychiatric facility. They spent $750,000 on renovations but eventually abandoned the project. For the next 20 years, the derelict building continued to deteriorate. It was a blight on the landscape and in the memories of the Ktunaxa people.
Former Chief Sophie Pierre was the main driving force behind the vision to reclaim the building and do something with it. Not everyone agreed. After all, nothing like this had been done before. Many wanted to demolish it to destroy any reminders. After two years of discussion, the five bands sharing the reserve land held a referendum, and 75% voted in favour of taking charge of the building. Then came 10 years of restoration work and preparing the grounds for the resort.
Maren took us into another room in the interpretive centre, where they screened the documentary film Survivors of the Red Brick School. It follows former students who wanted to visit the building one last time before it was transformed. Difficult to watch at times, the film deals with many of the abuses that took place. A box of tissues sits on the seats because the story affects people differently.
We talked to Cindy in the interpretive centre, who set the stage for the film and provided more background and context. While the film is dark, she indicates that they want people to leave feeling good. They had arranged for us to take a tour with Isaac Birdstone, a student here in the 1960s who loves to drum and sing. As a guide with the centre, he is adept at relating to people and setting them at ease while still providing insight, sometimes with a bit of humour.
Walking through the Past and Present
Our walk with Isaac proved to be the highlight of our visit. While we can learn about the history of residential schools from various well-documented sources, nothing compares with wandering former school corridors with someone who was there, lived the experience, and wants to share personal stories of what it was like.
Isaac’s great uncle Aloysius Birdstone was the last hereditary chief of the area. Had they continued with the hereditary system, Isaac explained that the chief’s position would have probably been his since the rest of his family is gone. Isaac comes from a large family, and his brothers and sisters also attended the school, but he was the only one to graduate after the school closed in 1970.
Walking through the hallways on our own, we see simply guestrooms and meeting rooms, but to Isaac, each of these places has stories. The top floor housed senior boys and senior girls, 80 of each. There were different dining rooms for boys and girls, and they weren’t allowed to talk to each other. Isaac wasn’t even supposed to speak to his sister.
As we passed the former Grade 1 classroom, Isaac recalled one of the nuns who was a strict disciplinarian. “She was as old as brick,” he laughed, “She had a yardstick. They didn’t use the flat side.”
Outside, we looked at the big red barn, which has since been refurbished and turned into the resort’s golf shop and restaurant. “They had horses there,” Isaac recalled. “But it wasn’t for us to learn to ride.”
Isaac’s attitude is that it’s important to remember the past but also to look to the future. “My motto: I will not forget. I will not forgive. But I will continue my journey on and on. That’s what I try to tell people – get away from your anger and continue your journey. We try to make it a happy place. It took me a while to get the students to come here, and now they love it.”
We finished our tour on the front steps of the grand building, with Isaac taking out his cherished drum. It was given to him when he worked in tribal policing, and it bears the signatures of prominent people. He played and sang a song, which he explained was a song about wandering.
“That’s what life is about,” he said in summary. “We wander and wonder.”
Reflecting on the ghosts of the past
Before coming to St. Eugene Resort, we weren’t sure what to expect. Stay in a former residential school? Surely, that would be a depressing experience. But it was quite the opposite. Today, St. Eugene is an enjoyable and upbeat place in a gorgeous setting, with guests having a good time and welcoming staff eager to please while passing along a bit of Ktunaxa culture.
The ghosts of the past are still there, and if we’re interested enough, we can hear their stories. The residential school narrative is presented as an invitation to those willing to learn more. The overarching story of transformation instills hope for the future. As Chief Sophie Pierre put it, “We’re creating new memories for our children.”
Robin & Arlene Karpan would like to thank St. Eugene Resort and Kootenay Rockies Tourism for their assistance in arranging this visit. All opinions in this article are completely their own.
Robin and Arlene Karpan are award-winning writers, photographers, bloggers, and authors of several travel books, including Canadian Bestsellers. Their work has appeared in over 100 publications around the world. While their travels have taken them to all seven continents, they find that some of the most compelling destinations are close to home in Canada. They have a special interest in the natural world and outdoor photography. Robin and Arlene publish the travel blog Photo Journeys which looks at travel through a photographer’s lens, and is rated by Feedspot as among the Top 100 Travel Photography Sites.