CANADA
Toronto Star
By: Donovan Vincent News reporter, Published on Sat Jun 13 2015
Some of the youngsters were locked up in cells like animals or beaten severely, and everyone had to eat oatmeal, day and night.
But former students of the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School in Brantford, like Audrey Hill, still want to preserve the building that housed these horrors decades ago.
“At first I was so very ashamed (of the building). I would have been one of the people saying ‘why would you save that?’ Now, I’m completely supportive of saving it,’’ says Hill, 61, a Mohawk who was sent to the now defunct residential school at age 10 by her mother.
Known at the time as the “mush hole” — a nickname given by aboriginal students who were forced to eat mushy oatmeal all day — the building stands for everything that was wrong with Canada’s residential school system: brutal racism, forced assimilation, and utter disdain for indigenous culture, customs and language.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.