What the referendum decided

When the resort's owners describe how St. Eugene came to exist, they tell it as a decision, not an investment. This is how that decision was made, in the words the resort has published.

The words that started it

Elder Mary Paul said that since the culture of the Kootenay people had been taken away within the St. Eugene Mission School, it should be within that building that it was returned. The resort's 2025 article dates this to 1984. Its history page adds a second saying of hers, quoted beside a photograph: "You lose something only if you refuse to pick it up again."

Kitchen tables

In 1992 former Chief Sophie Pierre, herself a former student at the school, began the work. The resort lists the steps: family visits to the school, "kitchen table" talks, and two years of discussion with more than 1,500 members of the five bands who share 130 hectares of reserve land. Pierre has said that many people had been so badly hurt by their time at the school that they would rather have seen the building torn down.

The vote

A referendum settled it. The resort's history says every band voted strongly for restoration. Its 2025 article says the five bands agreed unanimously to go ahead as equal owners. Pierre later called the decision "right", and said the resort had been "almost an impossible dream when we started".

The money

The bands needed $40 million. Reserve land cannot secure a loan, because First Nations do not hold title to it, and there was no funding programme for tourism projects. The resort's articles say this made borrowing slower and dearer. The solution was to build in stages. The Columbia Basin Trust helped build the golf course first, and it opened in May 2000. Investors were then taken to the 13th hole to see the valley for themselves. The casino followed in 2002 and the hotel in 2003. Federal job-development money let band members learn trades while they stripped the school back to its brick.

The result

Since June 2017 the resort has been owned by the four Canadian Ktunaxa bands and the Shuswap Indian Band, through St. Eugene Mission Holdings. The casino's page says it employs about 250 people. The resort writes that, to its knowledge, no other First Nation in Canada has reclaimed a former residential school and turned it into a resort.