CANADA
Ottawa Citizen
RUSS MOSES
Published on: May 18, 2015
The Indian Residential Schools experience looms large in the history of my family, just as it does for so many Native families across the country. Written from the vantage point of December, 1965 when he was 33 years old, the following excerpts from his memoir recount my late father Russ Moses’ experiences at the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School (“the Mush Hole”) in Brantford, Ontario which he attended from 1942 to 1947.
Russ and his older brother Elliott and younger sister Thelma had the misfortune of attending the Mohawk at the height of the Second World War, when any pretence toward providing education or training had largely been abandoned. The children were there to provide the forced agricultural labour necessary to keep the large farming operation going, as a contribution to the industrial-scale food production effort on the home front. The Mohawk sat on 350 acres of prime southern Ontario farmland with livestock and numerous crops and orchards under cultivation.
The children themselves derived no benefit from this, and were reduced to begging on the streets of Brantford to sustain themselves. Russ’s memoir remains of historical interest, predating as it does our current era of retrospection and reflection concerning the schools. It is presented here in recognition of the upcoming closing national event of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be held in Ottawa from May 31 to June 3. Russ refused to be defined by his residential school experiences. He was a loving husband, father and grandfather, as well as a proud Korean War veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy and later the RCAF, and finally a federal public servant specializing in employment equity matters. He died in Ottawa on May 22, 2013 and is buried at his home community of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory.
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