St. Ann’s Catholic Church (near Hedley, BC) destroyed by fire

In the early hours of Saturday, 26 June 2021, the historic St. Ann's Catholic Church near Hedley, British Columbia, on Upper Similkameen Indian Band (USIB) land, was destroyed by fire. Princeton RCMP received a call reporting the blaze at 3:52 a.m.; the more-than-century-old wooden church, which had served the community for generations, burned to the ground. About an hour later, at roughly 4:45 a.m., Our Lady of Lourdes Church on the Chopaka reserve on Lower Similkameen Indian Band land also caught fire, with flames spreading to nearby brush before crews extinguished them.

Police treated both fires as suspicious and said they were investigating possible connections to earlier church fires near Penticton and Oliver on 21 June 2021. RCMP reported that the investigations were ongoing with no arrests or charges. The fires came less than a month after the reported discovery of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, part of a wider national reckoning over Canada's residential-school system. USIB leadership expressed grief over the loss while stating that violence and destruction were not condoned, and a residential-school survivor described being devastated by the burning of the church.

This is a domestic Canadian incident, not an act of foreign hybrid warfare or state-linked sabotage. It occurred amid a summer-2021 wave of fires and vandalism affecting Catholic and other churches on or near First Nations land, in the emotionally charged period following revelations about unmarked graves at former residential schools. RCMP classified the St. Ann's fire as suspicious and consistent with arson, but no individual was publicly charged in connection with this specific blaze, and any motive remained a matter of investigation rather than confirmed fact.