Looking “behind the bricks” of the Mohawk Institute means understanding the experiences of the children who lived there: the routines, interactions with staff, work, play, discipline, and resistance that happened inside and outside its walls. Yet the “bricks” themselves—the architecture of the institution and its role in these experiences—merit attention as well. How did the children perceive the walls that confined them?
This chapter in Behind the Bricks: The Life and Times of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s Longest-Running Residential School, looks at the history of the Mohawk Institute through its built environment, from its beginnings in 1828 to its closure in 1970. Behind the Bricks is an edited volume, available in open access, that brings together wide-ranging scholarship about this institution situated on the territory of Six Nations of the Grand River in Brantford, Ontario.
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Richard W. Hill Sr., Alison Norman, Thomas Peace, and Jennifer Pettit, eds., Behind the Bricks: The Life and Times of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s Longest-Running Residential School (University of Calgary Press, 2025).
Magdalena Miłosz 