Image: A desk and a chair in the boys’ playroom at the former Mohawk Institute. Photo: Magdalena Miłosz & Courtesy Woodland Cultural Centre
Follow the Grand River towards Lake Erie and you will find a bend in its waters encircling a significant place. From a nearby street, you can glimpse the building down a long driveway flanked by trees. The approach is leafy, and only upon emerging at its entrance is its grandiosity fully revealed: symmetry, neoclassical features, a cupola rising above the three-storey red brick façade. It’s one of fewer than a dozen former residential schools for indigenous children left standing in Canada, and it’s an hour’s drive from Kitchener-Waterloo in southeast Brantford.
Magdalena Miłosz 