How one residential school morphed from troubled site to tourist resort canada.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from canada.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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At first glance, the St. Eugene Golf Resort and Casino looks like any other carefully renovated historic property, but its history is unlike any other hotel in the world.
From 1912 to 1970, the St. Eugene Mission near Cranbrook, B.C. was a residential school for indigenous children. The facility was the first comprehensive Indian Industrial and Residential school to be built in the Canadian West, one of an eventual 130 residential schools operating in Canada between 1831 and 1996. St. Eugene was built to accommodate 126 students, but as many as 200 students lived there during the 1950s and ’60s. In all, about 5,000 children from British Columbia and Alberta came through the school. Some did not survive the mistreatment, meted out here and in other residential schools.