Justice sought for deaths at former boarding school

The largest indigenous community in Canada has called for a criminal investigation into the deaths of dozens of children at the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, Ontario.

Speaking on behalf of survivors, Mark B Hill, elected chief of Six Nations of the Grand River, said the records show that 54 children died at the school during its 142 years of operation, but they do not know where those little bodies were buried.

“This is enough to trigger a criminal investigation, and our goal is to search for justice,” said Hill at the former boarding school on Wednesday.

The Mohawk Institute opened in 1828 as a day school for boys before it expanded to include girls and boarding students in 1834. It was relocated to Brantford in 1840 before being destroyed by fires. After the last rebuilding, the federal government operated the school from 1945 until its closure in 1970, making it one of the oldest and longest-running residential schools in Canada.

With the former school spanning 500 acres (202.2 hectares), Hill urged that “every last acre needs to be searched”.

“This is about recovering all of our children,” Hill said.

The Office of the Chief Coroner and Ontario Forensic Pathology Service will be supporting the investigation along with the Brantford police and the Ontario provincial police.

On Monday, both the federal and Ontario governments jointly committed $9.4 million for another phase in the restoration of the residential school building. Earlier this year, Ottawa set aside $27.1 million for communities to identify burial sites.

A series of unmarked graves have been discovered at former boarding schools across Canada since late May.

In the last month, discoveries of more than 1,000 graves prompted a nationwide reckoning over Canada’s painful past and its policies of forced assimilation toward indigenous communities.

At least 150,000 children from the indigenous community were forced to attend the schools between the late 1800s and the 1990s across the country. The institutions, known as “Canada’s Alcatraz”, were funded by the federal government and run by churches as part of a campaign to strip the youth of their cultural identity.