Former Mohawk Institute Residential School reopened as museum in Brantford, Ont.

After over a decade of planning, fundraising and construction the former Mohawk Institute Residential School officially reopened as a museum.

The Brantford site – now operated by the Woodland Cultural Centre – was Canada’s first and longest-operating residential school.

The faces stare back through time.

The faces of the estimated 15,000 children who were taken from their families and forced to attend the Mohawk institute during its more than 140 years of operation.

“And I think it’s important that we don’t ever forget what happened,” says Janis Bomberry from the Canadian Museums Association.

Over the decades, at least 105 Indigenous children died at the school – according to research conducted by the National Centre of Truth and Reconciliation and an organization of surviving students.

That fatal legacy of forced assimilation is being remembered with the building’s reopening as a museum – offering visitors a sense of what the school would have been like.

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It is a rare opportunity because only a handful of former residential schools still stand.

“A lot of survivors told us that you know looking at a plaque, cause a lot of the other residential schools were torn down, you don’t get that sense of what it’s like to actually be inside the space and see the walls and get to experience what it would have been like as a child who had to go through these horrible conditions,” Bomberry says.

One of the things about the Mohawk institute, it was really about separating families, and so when children arrived they were assigned a number, they were separated from their siblings,” says Heather George from the Woodland Cultural Centre.

The school’s former dining hall – where hungry, malnourished children were given oatmeal – inspired the survivors’ nickname for the institute – the mush hole.

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Despite the countless hours of arduous manual labour put in by those children at the school’s farm, the food that was grown was eaten by staff and sold at market.

Part of the residential system, the manual labour part, was really about earning an income, says George.

The former dormitory offers another window into the school’s history – a mirror reflecting beds – designed to convey the vast number of people who slept and suffered here.

And a collection of objects discovered in the walls, which serve to remind that the students were just children.

“When you see the little bits of toys, or the candy wrappers, or the little things that they saved and hid away in the walls, it helps to remind people of that,” George says.

They were children who suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse – often in this former laundry room – a space which survivors say was where some of the darkest acts of abuse occurred.

“With the machinery going the noise would be really loud so you wouldn’t be able to hear any screaming or crying in the space,” says Bomberry.

If you are interested in visiting yourself, the school is open to visitors, and you can plan your trip by going to the website.

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