The Road is Leading People Home ...
Some places carry history quietly in the land beneath them. Alert Bay is one of those places.
Across the water from the northern end of Vancouver Island, the village sits on Cormorant Island, wrapped in fog, cedar, and the steady rhythm of the tides. Visitors see fishing boats, the big house, the museum, and the shoreline. But for many families across the coast and into the north, Alert Bay holds something deeper. It is also the place where children were once taken to St. Michael’s residential school from communities scattered across British Columbia.
For decades, those children arrived here from villages separated by mountains, water, and hundreds of kilometres of coastline. Communities that had long been connected through kinship and travel were suddenly tied together through a place none of them had chosen.
Years later, when I first arrived in Alert Bay for my own work, I carried that history carefully. There is a weight to being in a place like this. The stories are not abstract. They live in families, in memory, in the quiet pauses of conversation.
But Alert Bay today also holds another story.
In recent years I had the privilege of supporting the ’Namgis First Nation as they established their own driving school — North Island Driving School a community-led initiative designed to bring driver education home to the island. For many rural and coastal communities, access to driver training is far away, often requiring long travel and ferry crossings simply to learn the basics of driving. By building their own program, the Nation created something powerful: the ability for people to learn, train, and gain independence within their own territory.
It is a practical thing, teaching someone to drive. There are rules of the road, mirrors to check, shoulder checks to remember, the quiet confidence that grows when someone realizes they can guide a vehicle safely down a road.
But in places like Alert Bay, it is never only practical.
Over the years I have travelled to communities across British Columbia teaching driver education. Coastal villages. Northern towns. Communities separated by long distances of highway, forest, and ocean. And in those classrooms and community halls, a quiet pattern began to emerge.
Many of the students I met, now Elders, parents, and grandparents had once been children connected to St. Michael’s. They came from different Nations, different territories, but their stories crossed in that same place.
What they often do not know is that they are learning together again.
Students in one community do not know that, hundreds of kilometres away, others who once walked the same halls in Alert Bay are sitting together studying the same road signs, preparing for the same test. They do not see the full circle that is quietly forming across the province.
But sometimes I do.
And in those moments it feels like watching a cord slowly pulling people back together.
Once, children were taken from their homes and brought to Alert Bay without choice. Today, many of those same families are coming back to the idea of movement in a very different way. Through the simple act of learning to drive, people are gaining the freedom to move again, to visit family, reach work, travel their territories, and participate fully in the life of their communities.
The vehicle becomes something more than transportation. It becomes a small but meaningful expression of freedom.
There is a deep privilege in witnessing this work. Supporting the ’Namgis Nation in building their own driving school was never simply about driver education. It was about creating local capacity, restoring access, and ensuring that communities can shape their own solutions.
And as I travel from place to place teaching the next group of learners, I sometimes think about the quiet connections that are being rebuilt across this landscape.
The students themselves may not see it yet. But the road between communities is slowly filling again with people who have found their way back to movement on their own terms.
In a place that once gathered children through systems of separation, something different is happening now.
Little by little, the road is leading people home.