PE K W’ X E : Y L E S
St. Mary’s Mission Mission sits on the north bank of the Fraser on a hillside that looks across the valley into the United States. The tidal bore of the river ends here, a hundred kilometres upriver from the sea. The city takes its name from the mission established by an Oblate priest a few years after the gold rush of the late 1850s. He chose the location for its lack of settlement, colonial or Aboriginal, in his determination to counter both the sway of the miner’s alcohol and the influence of Stó:lo traditions. Today the mission and the residential school that operated there for more than a hundred years exist only as foundations visible in the well-kept lawns of the Fraser River Heritage Park.
F
ST. MARY’S MISSION
ive generations of kids passed their childhoods in the mission school atop a bluff in the middle of
the valley. Instead of waking to mothers’ voices, they woke in dormitories and listened to orders from Oblate fathers who silenced them when they spoke the language of their parents. The Oblates practised a hard-working, love-the-poor Christianity with a sense of theatre—a flair for drama in ritual— shared by the Coast Salish. For about fifty years, many nations travelled to retreats at St. Mary’s, where the high point of the year was the Easter re-enactment of the last days of Jesus. In 1894, the same year the town formed the Mission City Fruit Growers & Canning Association, a thousand dugout canoes converged below the bluff, filling the river from shore to shore. Only the stone foundations of the mission remain today. The bluff has been turned into a park with tidy lawns and a complicated past. At the information centre an aerial photograph shows the old school, the barns, the fields, the tennis court and the new school built in the 1960s when the old one was closed—used mostly as dormitories for Native kids from rural reserves who were attending the high school in town. In Mission, the city that grew up around the corner, lacy
Page 44 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009