by Michelle Loughery

There once was a girl with coal dust in her hair and mural paint on her fingers.

She came from Michel-Natal, a town that once sat proud in the East Kootenay mountains, until it was forced into silence — dismantled in the name of tourism and government progress. The community was relocated, its heart scattered. But the girl watched, listened, and learned. She learned how systems erased people. And she learned how to bring them back.

Years later, with a vision rooted in memory and coal-town resilience, she brought a brush to a wall in Vernon, British Columbia. It was more than paint — it was planning, it was infrastructure, it was a placemaking strategy grown from immigrant hands and P3 project logic. She called it the Wayfinder Mural Model — art as infrastructure, stories as signposts, heritage as a way home.

Vernon wanted a revitalized downtown. It wanted murals but didn’t know how to fund them. She did. Her model — a design-build innovation before its time — was backed by federal support, grounded in government correspondence, and rooted in a lived community process. One brushstroke led to another, and soon, monumental heritage murals covered the city, connecting forgotten alleys, drawing visitors from the bypassing highways, and creating space for elders and youth to pass stories between generations. It wasn’t just art — it was urban planning, community healing, and economic transformation.

From Vernon, the trail grew — to Merritt, Vancouver, Victoria, and across the border into the United States, where her model added a bead to the Route 66 mural bracelet. Her brush linked towns the way the railroad once did — not with steel, but with story.

The trail became a cultural artery, crossing provinces, crossing ministries, weaving Indigenous communities, seniors, youth, and newcomers together in shared creation. Her app launched. Videos and partnerships formed. The Ministry of Tourism, Indigenous groups, Downtown BC — all sent letters of support. Even when funding dried up in 2008, she carried on. Even during COVID, the walls bloomed with sunflowers so people locked indoors could still feel connected. It was always about connection.

But then came the shift.

Success, as it often does, attracted opportunists. Murals became trendy. Developers and municipalities — many of whom had ignored, even opposed, her work in the early days — now saw the value. Not in the stories, but in the transactions. Not in the people, but in the profits.

In Vernon, where it began, the outdoor museum — an entire series of massive community-built heritage murals — began to fall. Neglected. Defaced. Removed. Not by time, but by design. The very murals that had revitalized downtown blocks were now seen as obstacles to a new development scheme. One by one, they were being erased — some called them “white settler murals” to avoid copyright law and moral obligations, not understanding (or ignoring) the multicultural hands that built them.

Behind the scenes, the city, developers, and even former students and colleagues used her planning documents, designs, and trail logic to build a new cultural center — in the very area where her murals stood. They offered no credit. No payment. No recognition of intellectual property. The same people who once resisted murals now replaced them with her own ideas, repackaged under new names.

The trail she designed — the one that connected communities and leveraged federal innovation funding — was now being used without her. The mural estate, the “living heritage centre” she helped create, had become prime real estate, and no one seemed to remember who made it all possible.

But the walls remember.

So do the youth who climbed scaffolds with her. So do the elders who shared their stories. So do the towns that once sat empty and now buzz with visitors because her brush brought them back to life.

This isn’t a story of standing in the way of progress. Michelle Loughery never stood in the way. She built the road.

This is a story about respect. About truth. About ownership. And about how stories, when painted on walls by communities, become more than decoration — they become public record.

The murals may fade. They may be painted over. But the story is not theirs to erase.

Loughery doesn’t just hold copyright — she holds history.

And if developers and municipalities want to use what she created — the mural plans, the tourism trail logic, the youth training architecture, the goodwill — they must, like any property transaction, pay for what they are taking. Murals are not free just because they are outdoors. Community monuments are not disposable. And design is not public domain just because it was successful.

The Wayfinder Trail still lives. In every small town that said yes when no one else listened. In every child who picked up a brush. In every elder who saw themselves honored on a wall. In every bypassed place that became a destination.

That girl with coal dust in her hair didn’t just paint murals. She built legacy.

And that can never be removed.