‘We Want to Blanket Ken with Love Today’ – The Tyee

As a geophysical search of Lejac Residential School gets underway, homemade quilts honour survivors.

Ken Luggi and Jim Foote shared a classroom for only a brief time.

Ken’s family, who is from the Stellat’en First Nation, had returned to the Fraser Lake area after Indian Affairs told them that the children couldn’t attend the public school where they had been living in Burns Lake, about an hour to the east.

The family enrolled Ken and his sister at the Fraser Lake elementary school, a few kilometres from the Stellaquo reserve.

There, as one of the few Indigenous children, Ken experienced racism. “It had a big impact on me,” he remembers. But the Foote family, who were not Indigenous, were different. Ken and Jim formed a lifelong friendship.