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…