6A “Model” School: An Architectural History of the Mohawk Institute

Magdalena Miłosz

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? Who designed, built, and maintained the institution’s buildings and landscapes? What were the practical and symbolic contributions of architecture in enacting an assimilative program? How did the architecture serve to shield the workings of the school from surrounding settler neighbourhoods? This chapter engages the built environment of the Mohawk Institute to explore these questions.

Industrial and residential schools for Indigenous children have not been extensively considered in the field of architectural history. Janet Wright mentions industrial schools in her study of Canadian federal architecture, Crown Assets, placing these “permanent and imposing symbols of the dominance and supremacy of white society” in the context of late nineteenth-century assimilation policy in Western Canada. “The design of these schools,” she writes, “which was firmly rooted in white society, was clearly intended to support and reinforce the values, skills, and codes of behaviour in which the students were so rigorously indoctrinated.”¹ For Geoffrey Carr, although residential schools bear a passing resemblance to building types like schools and prisons, they exist outside of these conventional typologies because “they cannot be understood apart from the distinct impressions of colonial power that required [their] construction.”² Focusing on schools in British Columbia, Carr uses their architecture as a historical source to both broaden understandings of the residential school system and to address what he sees as a gap in Canadian architectural history—namely, the role of architecture in settler-state oppression against Indigenous peoples.³ These histories interpret the architecture of industrial and residential schools as inseparable from their colonial purposes.⁴

Scholars in other disciplines have likewise used themes of space, place, and architecture to study residential schools. Like the architectural historians cited above, geographer Sarah de Leeuw links the physical spaces of residential schools to larger systems of power, arguing that these institutions existed in nested, “multidirectional and permeable” relationships with both “the smaller body-places” of students and “larger spatial colonial projects.”⁵ In other words, the architectural scale of the residential school functioned as an intermediary between the human scale of Indigenous children’s bodies and the regional or national scale of settler-colonial acquisition of Indigenous territory. In the US context, historian Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s work on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania examines how racial segregation was implicit in the buildings’ uses and spatial relationships at the scale of the campus.⁶ She argues that Carlisle’s built environment served a dual purpose, that of enabling control and surveillance of students and that of conveying to non-Indigenous outsiders the benefits of assimilating Indigenous peoples.⁷ As this chapter will show, a similar dynamic animated the architecture of the Mohawk Institute. Domesticity is embedded in the architecture of residential schools, and anthropologist Jo-Anne Fiske looks specifically at changing understandings of their domestic character in light of survivors’ disclosures of abuse. She charts how survivor testimony catalyzed a “discursive shift” about residential schools from private to public, from the schools possessing a “mystique of domestic altruism” to becoming “the most poignant symbol of colonial violence.”⁸ This scholarship suggests that the architectural scale of residential schools can illuminate both the broader aims of the settler-colonial authorities who built them and the experiences of the children who were taken there.⁹

This chapter takes a similar, multi-scalar approach to the architectural history of the Mohawk Institute. The first three sections examine the institution’s three main architectural phases: its beginnings at the Mohawk Village in 1828 and conversion into a residential institution in 1834, the yellow-brick building constructed in 1858, and the red-brick building of 1904, which still stands today. Although this periodization is based on the construction dates of new main buildings, it is important to note that the built environment of the Mohawk Institute was in fact undergoing continuous change through repairs, renovations, additions, and other modifications. Furthermore, the spaces of the institution extended far beyond the main buildings, encompassing many outbuildings within expansive agrarian and ornamental landscapes. Nonetheless, this periodization is useful because each of the three phases can be understood through an additional layer of historical evidence, from text only, to visual sources such as plans and photographs, through to the testimony of survivors.

This layering of evidence renders an increasingly complex view of the Mohawk Institute’s built environment over time, moving from official viewpoints to the experiences of the children who inhabited and laboured within it. Some key themes that reappear throughout this long history are official perceptions of the school as a “model” or “pattern” institution, the use of architecture for segregation and control, as well as continual change through repairs, renovations, and additions, frequently using the children’s labour. The fourth section of this chapter pays particular attention to how survivors understood the built environment of the Mohawk Institute, with a focus on segregation, discipline, labour, and play. The final section examines the extensive architectural changes of the post–Second World War period, associated with the government’s attempts to reform the residential school system. Taken together, this chapter demonstrates how the architecture of the Mohawk Institute not only reflected, but also enacted, the goals of missionaries and the state. It was not a backdrop, but a key component of the daily struggles of power, assimilation, and resistance that took place at the school.

The Mohawk Institute at the Mohawk Village: Beginnings to Abandonment (1828–1858)

A predecessor of the Mohawk Institute was a day school established in the Mohawk Village in the 1780s by the Kanyen’kehaka (Mohawk) leader Thayendanegea, also known as Joseph Brant.¹⁰ In his youth, Brant had been educated at Moor’s Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, which aimed to train Indigenous and settler students as missionaries, diplomats, and translators.¹¹ Brant’s time at the school was among the experiences that shaped his “cross-cultural belief systems,” which Rick Monture argues “influenced not only his own life, but . . . also had considerable impact upon the rest of the Six Nations throughout the rest of the late eighteenth century.”¹² The school stood across from the Mohawk Chapel, a small Carpenter Gothic Anglican church, in a settlement of about twenty-four houses as well as a council house.¹³ Both the church and the school were part of the strategy of cultural syncretism by which Six Nations intended to maintain control of their lands and continue their distinct Haudenosaunee identity in the face of colonial pressures.¹⁴

This perspective of cultural exchange was reflected in a 1781 publication, A Primer for the Use of the Mohawk Children / Waerighwaghsawe iksaongoenwa, which contains lessons printed in English on one side and Kanyen’keha on the other.¹⁵ It was written by Daniel Claus, who supervised the resettlement of the Six Nations at Grand River following the loss of their lands during the American Revolution. The second edition, published in 1786, features an engraved frontispiece by James Peachey depicting a classroom with Kanyen’kehaka students and their teacher (figure 6.1). It has been speculated that the teacher in the scene is a portrayal of Paulus Sahonwadi, a Kanyen’kehaka schoolmaster who was acquainted with Claus and was living at Grand River by 1785.¹⁶ Likewise, it is tempting to conjecture that the engraving might represent the interior of the first Mohawk Village school as it actually existed. The artist, Peachey, was known for his watercolour views of Canadian places; he was also a surveyor and draughtsman associated with Governor Frederick Haldimand and would have had occasion to visit the Mohawk Village in person.¹⁷ The high wood-beam ceiling, wood floorboards, and double-hung window shown in the engraving may well reflect the space in which young Kanyen’kehaka scholars learned during a time of great transition for their nation.

The beginnings of the Mohawk Institute itself came forty years later, a decade after the original day school was disrupted by the War of 1812. No visual sources or student testimonies exist from this early era, although some sense of what the institution looked like can be pieced together from settler-colonial texts, especially the reports of the New England Company (NEC), the missionary society which ran it. A short account by the notorious Indian Affairs bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott, written a century after the Mohawk Institute’s founding, is also useful.

Scott writes that in 1822, Joseph Brant’s son, John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs), travelled to England, with “one of his requests being the establishment of an Indian school.”¹⁸ What Scott does not mention is that Brant made this request in the context of a broader appeal for the Crown to take action on the “undue acquisition” and “encroachments upon” Six Nations territory.¹⁹ While the land issue remained unresolved, the school was started in 1824 with twenty-one students attending.²⁰ Initially, it may have been located in the old school, a house, or other repurposed building. Two years later, Brant requested further funds for various building projects and, “although there is evidence that the materials for the Mohawk Village school were on the ground the same year, it was not until 1828 that the school building was ready for occupation.”²¹

Brant played a part in establishing the Mohawk Institute, but did not necessarily have broad community support. The NEC initially “sought the approval of the Six Nations people for all educational undertakings” and the school was certainly viewed positively by some, with wait-lists at times.²² However, as Susan M. Hill observes, Brant, like his father, was an ambiguous figure who held leadership roles within both the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the imperial government.²³ He actively promoted Christianity and education, but, according to Monture, “the Grand River community was reluctant to fully embrace such practices.”²⁴

Notwithstanding wavering community support, religious and secular colonial authorities regarded the Mohawk Institute with optimism, evident in the rapid pace at which it expanded in its early years. In 1829, the NEC missionary in charge of the school, the Reverend Robert Lugger, reported that Brant and Sir John Colborne, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, intended “to draw on the Treasurer for the sum allowed by the Company, for the purpose of advancing the children in various handicraft works, and for the residences.”²⁵ The result was the addition, in 1830, of a “Mechanics’ Institution” to facilitate industrial training for boys.²⁶ By the following year, the school comprised, besides the mechanics’ shop, “four large rooms, in two of which girls might be taught spinning and weaving, and in the other two, the boys tailoring and carpentering.”²⁷ In 1834, residences were added with accommodation for ten boys and four girls.²⁸ Both the industrial training and boarding facilities can be linked to the prevailing “Christianize and civilize” mission model, which used cultural re-education to support religious conversion.²⁹ Lugger himself expressed this perspective, writing that it would be impossible for the children to understand what they learned “until they are taken from their families and obliged to speak nothing but English.”³⁰ Another NEC missionary, the Reverend Abraham Nelles, stationed nearby at Tuscarora, believed that “while the groundwork of improvement must be laid amongst the young, that can be but imperfectly done if they are left to live and grow up at home.”³¹ This missionary philosophy meshed with government views, as expressed in Colborne’s proposal for “civilizing” Indigenous peoples through settlement in villages, agriculture, education, and religious instruction.³²

Attention soon turned to increasing the institution’s population. In 1835, the NEC treasurer wrote that “wishes were expressed that the number of children might be increased from fourteen to fifty.”³³ By early 1839, there were about thirty children.³⁴ This number was apparently accommodated by altering the existing buildings, rather than expanding them, as the NEC reported that “it has been gratifying . . . to have been able, whilst the number of scholars was nearly doubled, so to alter the arrangements there, as greatly to increase the means of comfort and instruction to them all.”³⁵ Later that year, however, Nelles, who had been appointed principal upon Lugger’s death in 1836, received “the assent of the Company to the enlargement of the Mohawk Institution.”³⁶ This addition, which would enable the accommodation of forty children in total, was completed in the summer of 1840.³⁷ The school’s carpenters were employed to do the work, assisted by student apprentices, saving “the Company any advance in money for that portion of the labour, which would come under the heading of carpentering.”³⁸ Whereas boys worked on building the structure, girls worked at the domestic labour of maintaining it. Several girls, however, protested having to perform “menial . . . household duties” by leaving the institution.³⁹

The expansion of the Mohawk Institute’s physical plant in the 1830s was clearly linked to missionary assimilation efforts, which in turn were tied to broader settler-colonial processes. Training young people “in the arts, habits and customs of civilized life,” as the missionaries put it, was the best way to “remove . . . prejudices” and change the “irresolute and suspicious” attitudes of their communities, who viewed “all whites as intruders.”⁴⁰ The missionaries did not consider, or else ignored, the fact that the Six Nations had legitimate concerns about the encroaching settler occupation of their territory. In the early 1840s, the Mohawk Village was largely, but not entirely, abandoned after the government relocated residents south of the Grand River due to an influx of non-Indigenous squatters on their lands.⁴¹ Nelles remained undeterred, proposing in 1844 that the Mohawk Institute should be conducted “on a larger scale” and that “more land should be attached to it, in the cultivation of which the children might be employed.”⁴² The relocation seemed to present a justification for expanding the institution’s residential facilities, since few families now lived in the village.⁴³ The physical separation of the school from the community could only have helped the missionaries’ aim of producing graduates to “act as instruments in the hands of the Company, for the complete civilization of Indians generally.”⁴⁴

It was around this time that the Mohawk Institute became known as a “model” or “pattern” institution by Indian Affairs.⁴⁵ Specifically, the 1847 Report on the Affairs of the Indians in Canada recommended that Indigenous children should be given an education “on a uniform system, something similar to the New England Company’s Establishment.”⁴⁶ What was considered prototypical about the Mohawk Institute was not necessarily its precise architectural arrangement, but its combination of classroom and industrial work in a residential setting. However, the accommodation of these functions within its built environment would likely have drawn attention from those looking to establish similar institutions. A visitor around this time remarked that “the school . . . is upon a plan almost exactly the same as that adopted in the boarding and day schools for farmers’ sons in England.”⁴⁷

The previously consistent growth of the Mohawk Institute plateaued during the 1840s. In 1844, “the boarding school . . . numbered between 40 and 50 children,” yet by the end of the decade, the population remained at fifty, with another fifty awaiting admission.⁴⁸ Despite an apparently lengthy waiting list, no building projects appear to have been initiated during this period. In 1853, the NEC finally agreed with Nelles that “more commodious buildings were necessary for extending the Institution.”⁴⁹ Yet three years later, in 1856, the principal reported that “the Institution building was in very bad repair” and recommended converting it into workshops, constructing a new, larger building in its place.⁵⁰ However, a fire destroyed the existing school in 1858, prompting its move a few hundred metres away to its present location, where it was rebuilt on a larger scale (figure 6.2).⁵¹

In the absence of visual evidence or survivor testimony, an early architectural history of the Mohawk Institute can be gleaned from a variety of settler-colonial texts. These sources yield only a biased and partial view of the institutional built environment, but they nevertheless reveal several spatial themes that would reappear in each of its subsequent phases. These include the incorporation of residential and industrial spaces in its building program, as well as the gendered segregation of space; its role as a model institution, which would extend to refer more specifically to its architecture; as well as continual change, often through unfree student labour in building construction and maintenance.

The Yellow-Brick Building: Architectural Change and Destruction (1858–1903)

From the road, an elaborate white gate guarded a long lane leading to a boxy, two-storey Georgian building of buff-yellow brick.⁵² This was the new Mohawk Institute, completed and occupied in April 1858 by fifty-five children and the staff. In September, Principal Nelles wrote that he “would probably make it sixty, which would be as many as the building would accommodate without some additions.”⁵³ Like the first school, the new site would indeed be characterized by almost incessant expansion. The Mohawk Institute’s second architectural phase is well-documented not only in text but also in visual sources such as photographs and plans, which enable a more fine-grained analysis of the institution’s visual and spatial codes.

Although the new building lacked overt classical details such as columns, cornices, pediments, and arches, it nevertheless presented a stripped-down version of typical Georgian classicism: symmetry, chimneys on either side, a low hipped roof, and a row of five unpaired, double-hung sash windows on the upper floor (figure 6.3).⁵⁴ The style had arrived in Upper Canada during the late eighteenth century from the United States and Britain, when it was already considered old-fashioned in those places.⁵⁵ Georgian classicism was associated with a continuity of British traditions and in Upper Canada, specifically, the style “declared loyalty to the British Crown and British values.”⁵⁶ It remained popular in Ontario through the mid-nineteenth century, a period often referred to as late Georgian or Georgian Survival.⁵⁷ At the Mohawk Institute, these architectural references connected the institution to British imperialism and Anglicanism, but also to Six Nations’ historical relationship with Britain as sovereign allies.

The architectural historian Harold Kalman counts “many Mohawks who had remained loyal to the Crown, and whose land had been bartered away to the Americans” among the seven thousand Loyalists who influenced the profusion of the Georgian style in Canada.⁵⁸ Johnson Hall, the pre-revolutionary home of Sir William Johnson and Molly Brant (Konwatsi’tsiaiénni) in Kanyen’kehaka territory at Johnstown, New York, was another significant Georgian building in Haudenosaunee history.⁵⁹ Built in 1763, it served as the site of councils among Haudenosaunee chiefs and colonial officials. Edward Lamson Henry’s painting of one such gathering shows Haudenosaunee chiefs assembled in a circle in front of the house, with its rectangular form, pedimented entrance, five window bays, cornice, and double-hipped roof (see figure 6.4). The circle and the square suggest two distinct world views functioning side by side.⁶⁰ Johnson Hall demonstrates some of the ways that Georgian classicism may have worked as part of the Mohawk Institute’s symbolism in the broader historical context of British-Haudenosaunee relations. If so, it was no longer in a geopolitical situation of two sovereign cultures, but one that stressed Britishness over Indigeneity.

The domestic scale and appearance of the 1858 Mohawk Institute was typical of first-generation residential schools. These were sometimes called “homes,” and the Mohawk Institute was referred to as a “household” by the New England Company and staff.⁶¹ The administrative hierarchy was modelled on the settler nuclear family: the principal, generally a man, was the head of the “household,” while his female counterpart, often his wife, was the matron.⁶² Although all residential schools were inherently domestic in that children and staff lived at the institutions, early missionary boarding schools, in particular, resembled single-family domestic architecture. This was related to the schools’ teaching of habitus—socially ingrained habits and ways of life—as a form of assimilation, in addition to labour and religious, academic, and industrial training. Religious and secular authorities’ removal of children from their family homes and placement within home-like environments modelled on settler culture were key to this philosophy.

The veranda that spanned the Mohawk Institute’s front facade highlighted its domestic character in a public way, acting as a threshold between an idealized settler domestic interior within and the agrarian and natural worlds beyond. Robert Mugerauer writes of porches as mediating places between interiors and exteriors, both in social and environmental terms; grander houses with wealthier and more powerful inhabitants tended to have larger and more elevated porches.⁶³ The Mohawk Institute’s veranda was elevated to accommodate the raised basement below the ground floor, but it also flagged the institution’s importance, to both occupants and passersby. Ascending the veranda’s thirteen steps may have been an intimidating experience, particularly for younger children arriving for the first time, but also for visitors who were not used to such large structures.

Beyond the veranda of the Mohawk Institute was a landscape characteristic of late nineteenth-century rural southern Ontario, whose rapid deforestation was being tempered by increased planting.⁶⁴ A dense stand of trees serving as a windbreak on the border of a field, orchards, and parallel rows of maples along the entrance road to the main building were typical of this type of landscape (figure 6.5).⁶⁵ The gate and fence added to the sense of order, conforming to “the regularity of the surveys and the land-division regime that had been gradually implanted since the first days of colonization.”⁶⁶ This was a visual expression of mastery over nature, a fitting message for a colonial institution increasingly focused on transforming Indigenous children into farmers. In 1859, Six Nations allowed over two hundred acres of adjacent farmland to be held in trust by the NEC as long as it continued to operate the school.⁶⁷ Its landscape thus became a productive agricultural terrain that, through the children’s labour, would sustain the institution, largely through the sale of these goods.

Congruent with its domestic character, the new building was used primarily as a living space in its early years, since classes continued to be held at the old school near the Mohawk Chapel. Describing his visit to the institution in July 1860, Anglican clergyman Frederick O’Meara wrote, “The buildings appear to me to be very commodious and suitable for the purpose for which they are intended; but I think that a good-sized school-house close to the building, is much needed—the one that is at present in use being that belonging to the old institution, and at a considerable distance from the new building.”⁶⁸ The separation of the residences and classrooms created an expanded institutional landscape, marked by the children’s regular walks to and from classes at the former site. O’Meara’s suggestion that the institution should be expanded would be realized over the next two decades. A series of additions would transform the building, making it almost unrecognizable by the end of its forty-five-year existence. The NEC approved the first addition in 1864, based on a sketch provided by Nelles, and it was completed the following year.⁶⁹

Criticism of the facility began to mount a few years later, when an NEC report recommended that each child should have a separate bed as “the dormitories seemed very clean and well ventilated, but there were only 16 beds for 37 boys so some contained three boys apiece.”⁷⁰ Around the same time, Nelles had also “suggested that a school-house should be built with two apartments, one for boys and one for girls,” to allow enough space in the existing building for each boy to have his own bed.⁷¹ This suggestion, along with reports of overcrowding in the dormitories, persisted in the following years.⁷² An 1872 report criticized the fourteen-year-old building in terms of overcrowding, health, and safety, citing the need for improved ventilation and heating, as well as a hospital.⁷³ In addition to persistently overcrowded dormitories, the lavatories were a point of contention that revealed the staff’s racist perceptions of the children in the institution. When staff showed the girls’ lavatory to John Martland, the master of Upper Canada College, he was told the children were given “tubs and pails” rather than wash basins, because they were “dirty in their habits.”⁷⁴ For the boys, their classroom doubled as their recreation space and where they washed in winter: “The room was very little better than a cellar in an ordinary house; not so good as a laundry. . . . In summer the boys washed in a shed close by, in which he saw one tub and one pail. He asked about the privies, but could get no answer.”⁷⁵ These observations documented the austere and unhygienic conditions prevailing at the school and suggested that the staff had different perceptions of what constituted an appropriate environment for the children than did outside observers. In a place supposedly conducted for their education and eventual absorption into settler society, the environment signalled to the children that they were inferior to the mainly white staff.

A new principal, the Reverend Robert Ashton, arrived at the Mohawk Institute with his family in 1872. His initial positive impression quickly gave way to a less favourable assessment: “It is very pleasantly situated, and from the public road has the appearance of being a newly and substantially built brick building, with a wooden veranda six feet wide across the front and level with the first floor. On passing the gate, however, from the general appearance of neglect and untidiness, I began to think the whole place deserted.”⁷⁶ Ashton condemned the landscaping; the unfinished state of the building; poor ventilation; limited staff accommodation; ill-defined physical boundaries for children, parents, and other visitors; and the fact that he and his family had to dine with the staff, as there was no separate dining room for them.⁷⁷ Motivated perhaps in part by improving conditions for the children, and certainly those of his own family, he set about renovating the school and lands. Scott noted that “the new principal had an eye for beauty and he turned the uninteresting grounds in front of the building into lawns and planted shrubs and trees.”⁷⁸ Ashton could thus take credit, at least in part, for the straight rows of trees and perfectly mowed lawns, both symbols and embodiments of nature tamed through settler-colonial industry. The principal also contemplated expanding the building in order “to admit children at the earliest age,” while another official suggested that the Mohawk Institute should take children “even in infancy,” though this was not common in schools.⁷⁹ The physical expansion of the institution can thus be linked to authorities’ perceived capacity to remove more, and increasingly younger, children from their homes and communities in service of their assimilative agenda.

Efforts to improve the institutional environment reflected the dichotomy between appearance and reality that characterized the Mohawk Institute and other residential schools. On the one hand, the physical plan was there to enable the religious and cultural assimilation of Indigenous children who, despite progressivist rhetoric from some quarters, were not seen as the equals of settler children, and certainly not equals of the staff. The quality of the built environment as the setting “where the experiment to transform Indians was being conducted,” as Fear-Segal writes of the Carlisle school in the United States, reflected this disparity.⁸⁰ On the other hand, the institution also served as a “living showcase, where the results of this experiment were displayed to the White public.”⁸¹ Another example, the Model Indian School at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, was the epitome of residential-school-as-display. Built as a functioning boarding school resembling those proliferating across the continent, it offered the exhibition-going public an up-close view of assimilation in progress using actual students as performers.⁸²

Permanent institutions like Carlisle and the Mohawk Institute partook in similar practices of display. As the “model” institution for Indigenous children in Canada, the Mohawk Institute’s functions included exhibiting the worthiness of the colonial assimilation project to visitors. Apart from NEC officials, the institution received members of the public and dignitaries like the Prince of Wales, who made an appearance in 1860 as part of his tour of British North America. These practices can be understood at the intersection of what Erving Goffman calls “institutional display” and the nineteenth-century “exhibitionary complex” described by Tony Bennett, a strong focus of which was the cultures of colonized peoples, put on display to strengthen popular support for imperial policies.⁸³

In 1879, the Indian Affairs visiting superintendent reported that the grounds at the Mohawk Institute “have been much improved, with a large addition to the main building, rendering it a model establishment.”⁸⁴ The new addition, at the rear of the existing building, doubled its size. Ashton also noted the construction of “a play-house for the boys” and “extensive improvements and repairs to the main building.”⁸⁵ In plan, the original building continued the Georgian symmetry of the exterior with a central staircase hall aligned with the main entrance, while the new wing was connected at its back left corner (figure 6.6). Immediately inside the front door were a parlour and reception room on either side, the latter probably where children could meet their parents and other visitors. A school regulation from the 1870s stated they could meet with family on Saturdays between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. “in the room set apart for that purpose.”⁸⁶ Adjacent to the parlour was the superintendent’s dining room, likely created to address Ashton’s complaint of having to dine with the staff. Beyond the parlour and dining room were three bedrooms, which together constituted the more private domestic sphere of the principal and his family. Across the central hall from the parlour, the reception room led to an office connected to the junior schoolroom, which in turn led to the new back wing with the senior school room and master’s (teacher’s) room.

Segregation of boys and girls, typical in residential school buildings, rigidly enforced colonial gender differences.⁸⁷ At the Mohawk Institute’s newly expanded building, the separation was not as clearly inscribed as in later schools, but the main block could be understood as the girls’ area, while the new rear wing was for the boys. This division was most evident on the upper floor, where both the girls’ and boys’ dormitories were located but completely disconnected, with no passage between them—each was accessed separately from the floor below. Unlike the large, open dormitories of later residential institutions for Indigenous children, they were divided by wooden half-height partitions into smaller areas, each with space for between two and eleven children. These partitions created a minimal sense of privacy and may also have sorted students by age while enabling staff to monitor children through auditory and, to some extent, visual surveillance. The 1879 plan shows ninety-three beds, forty-eight in the boys’ dormitory and forty-five in the girls’. Although they remained very close together, there were now enough beds for each child to have their own.

Circulation through and use of the Mohawk Institute’s interior spaces were tightly controlled. From their dormitory, girls could descend the central stairs, past the ground floor, and into the basement, where their lavatory and clothes room were located. Here, also, was the sewing room, which would have been used exclusively by girls during domestic science lessons and while doing work, like mending, for the institution. Moving into the new wing through the staff dining room and past the kitchen, they could reach their dining room, which was next to, but separate from, that of the boys. The boys, conversely, arrived at their dining area down a set of stairs at the back of their dormitory, which went past their ground-floor lavatory and clothes room, and through a separate door next to the cellar, marked “boys entrance to dining room.”

Food was a strong mechanism of social control at residential schools. Spaces of food consumption at the Mohawk Institute were correspondingly arranged in a hierarchical way: In the basement were the children and staff, the former in gender-segregated group dining areas and the latter in a separate dining room on the other side of the kitchen, while the dining room for the principal and his family was on the ground floor. The internal organization of residential schools, writes J. R. Miller, “was a silent reminder of racial barriers as well as gender differences. Nowhere was this more dramatically revealed than in the separate dining facilities for staff and students.”⁸⁸ In addition to segregating girls and boys in the dormitories, lavatories, and dining room, the arrangement of space reinforced racial hierarchies in areas like the dining rooms as part of the school’s “hidden curriculum.”⁸⁹

During the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Mohawk Institute underwent a series of dramatic renovations and additions. Its simple Georgian exterior was radically transformed into an elaborate Gothic Revival ensemble, a change that reflected architectural trends, Canadian nationalism tied to Britain, and the Anglican adoption of Gothic as a denominational style (figures 6.8 and 6.9).⁹⁰ The latter was connected to the ideas of the Ecclesiological Society, which was influential in promoting a return to medieval building practices for Anglican churches in England and its colonies.⁹¹ More broadly, the Gothic Revival was intertwined with the maintenance of a British Protestant identity through architecture in the global “Anglosphere,” connecting the Mohawk Institute not only to Britain itself but to Britain’s global empire.⁹² In this period, therefore, Georgian buildings were often reinterpreted with Gothic Revival detailing.⁹³ The Mohawk Institute’s new “Gothic garb” consisted of elaborate trim, including decorative brackets on the veranda, scroll-shaped brackets (or corbels) at the eaves, and a new dormer window with a finial (an ornament at the apex of the roof).

The first major addition, in 1886, included a residence for the principal’s family, probably the new wing resembling a single-family house, visible to the left of the main building (figure 6.8). It had a separate entrance at ground level, emphasized by a porch with intricate roof cresting, along with other Gothic Revival details like louvered shutters, an elaborate bargeboard, and a prominent finial capping the gable. The addition reflected the necessity for the principal to live on-site, but also his power to delineate private space for himself and his family within the institution. The renovations also included improvements to staff living areas and increased sleeping space for the children, doubling the size of the boys’ dormitories. The new roof dormer, with twin arched windows, suggests that the attic was turned into usable space. The addition also created a picturesque irregularity, another feature of the Gothic Revival, that contrasted with the building’s earlier symmetry.⁹⁴ Boys from the institution worked on the construction, completing most of the carpentry and painting.⁹⁵ It was thus the unfree labour of the children that aesthetically reinterpreted the building as part of an expanding imperial Gothic world.

Toward the end of the century, the Mohawk Institute was seemingly under constant construction. The mechanical and electrical systems were upgraded in 1891, and a brick basement was added to the boys’ playhouse, which contained a “lavatory, hot and cold shower baths, dressing room, in which each boy has a separate locker, a boot shelf and towel rack.”⁹⁶ Electrical lighting was also added to the classrooms and sewing room, the furnace moved from the dining hall into a new furnace room in the boys’ wing, and new equipment for cooking, baking, and hot water were added to the kitchen.⁹⁷

The second major addition was built in 1893–4, with slightly larger massing, but similar detailing, which balanced out the previous addition of 1886 (figure 6.9). A cupola, in the style of a widow’s walk, crowned the roof. This feature had both practical and symbolic uses, as it may have been associated with a new ventilation system, but also communicated the authority of the institution and thus the supposed superiority of settler-colonial culture.⁹⁸ The new, three-storey wing contained a playroom for the girls in the basement, which also housed two furnaces for heating the building, as well as a classroom, dormitories, and staff bedrooms. By 1896, the third floor was used as a “hospital for contagious diseases.”⁹⁹ The existing building was also renovated, and the institution was now capable of holding 30 additional children, for a total of 120.¹⁰⁰ This expansion in capacity coincided with an Indian Act amendment in 1894 that empowered Indian agents to send children to residential schools if they believed parents to be unfit or unwilling to provide for their child’s education. Thus, architecture was linked with the state’s ability to carry out colonial policies of assimilation and cultural destruction.

Although confinement probably existed earlier in the Mohawk Institute’s history, we get detailed descriptions of these spaces and practices from an 1894 account by Martin Benson, an Indian Affairs inspector from the Schools Branch. He described two rooms used to confine children: the dormitories, which were locked at night, and purpose-built rooms for solitary confinement. He wrote that “the pupils are all locked in their dormitories at night, but each lock has a pane of glass . . . which can be broken in case of alarm and the bolt shot back.”¹⁰¹ He also described fire escapes and other safety measures, suggesting that confining the children in this way did not really pose a danger to them. A description of the solitary confinement rooms used for punishment included a similar rationalization:

A room at the head of the landing leading to the rear of the Principal’s house, is set apart for the solitary confinement of very refractory boys with a similar place on the girls [sic] side of the building. These two rooms are about 6 by 10 and are only lighted by a barred fanlight over the door. I asked the Principal if he ever had occasion to make use of these rooms, and he replied that he sometimes did so for short periods and that he found that this mode of punishment has a most salutary effect.¹⁰²

If the confinement was “short,” in the principal’s eyes, and had the desired result of forcing children to modify their behaviour then perhaps, Benson might have thought, it was justifiable. Yet for a child, being locked alone in a dark room was likely a particularly distressing experience. It is also important to consider that these rooms were deliberately included in planning the renovations of the building. Nested within the larger institutional landscape, these small spaces of confinement operated as concentrated spaces of social control in the service of the church and government’s colonial objectives.

Many outbuildings supported the operation of the Mohawk Institute in addition to the main building, forming a complex social and agricultural landscape. Barns and sheds were used to store crops that the students harvested from the farm, such as wheat, oats, and peas.¹⁰³ Boys milked cows and girls churned butter in another building with a “cold-storage room.”¹⁰⁴ The trade shop was busy as well, with its resident carpenter employed in building maintenance, but Ashton complained that the boys did not want to stay long enough to gain “a fair knowledge of their trade.”¹⁰⁵ In 1892, a greenhouse was built, where a gardener and the children cultivated flowers, fruits, and vegetables that were sold.¹⁰⁶ It is unclear if children benefited from the food they produced, but later testimony suggests they did not to any great extent.

The role of residential school students in building the very institutions that contained them has recently received more scholarly attention. In her research on children’s work at the nearby Mount Elgin Institute, Mary Jane Logan McCallum draws a connection between the location of the school on reserve land and that fact that it “experienced the full brunt of the notoriously stingy federal government, which delayed necessary repairs, cut corners, and,” as at the Mohawk Institute, “whenever possible offloaded building and maintenance labour onto students.”¹⁰⁷ Alexandra Giancarlo notes that in 1902, the Manitoba Free Press reported that male students at the Brandon residential school “built their own buildings.”¹⁰⁸ At the Mohawk Institute, boys were likewise employed. When the old buildings near the Mohawk Chapel fell into disrepair, some materials were taken from them to build “five large pig-sties” at the new location.¹⁰⁹ Students laboured on the construction of the pig sties under the supervision of the resident carpenter and did other work, like painting.¹¹⁰ In their “spare time,” they worked at paving the barnyard using stones gathered from the fields.¹¹¹ Benson noted that “the barns, sheds, stables, silos, barn-yards and grounds were neatness personified, while everything in and about the building was scrupulously clean and tidy.”¹¹² Later on, the boys also built a new cottage for the gardener, and renovated the Mohawk Chapel.¹¹³ Like the main building, the larger landscape of the Mohawk Institute bore evidence of the children’s constant labour through its remarkable neatness and impressive appearance to outsiders.

The landscape also included elements of recreation alongside work. The upper floor of the boys’ playhouse contained a reading room, clothes press, playroom, and trunk room. The principal thought, in a bit of foreshadowing, that this outbuilding could provide refuge in case there was a fire in the main building.¹¹⁴ Here, the boys played draughts, dominoes, shuffleboard, and read magazines. Their wooden muskets were stored here as well, and used for military-style exercises that, along with a system of rewards and punishments, rendered the school “as well regulated and controlled as a piece of machinery, going on without stop or hitch from morning to night.”¹¹⁵ On a Sunday, the girls might be “walking along the avenue and about the grounds in front of the Institute while the boys were taking their Sunday recreation on the other side in rear of the building.”¹¹⁶

Reading settler-colonial textual and visual sources largely elides the children’s experiences, which is why the actions of several boys in destroying the Mohawk Institute buildings speak so loudly. Aside from running away, arson was one of the most explicit ways for children to protest harsh conditions at residential schools, because by destroying the institution’s buildings, they directly affected its ability to function.¹¹⁷ On 19 April 1903, a group of boys twice attempted to burn down the school. The second attempt was successful, and the building perished, just as the previous one had nearly fifty years earlier. The next day, The Globe reported that “the entire structure was burned to the ground, only the walls standing.”¹¹⁸ The blaze at the school was followed by the burning of barns, together with cows and horses, on 7 May. Finally, on 21 June, students set fire to the playhouse, which, as the principal had predicted, had become their temporary residence. Eight boys were arrested in connection with these incidents; four confessed to arson and received sentences of three to five years at the Mimico Industrial School and Kingston Penitentiary.¹¹⁹

The Red-Brick Building: Expansion and Continuity of the “Model” (1904–1970)

After the fires of 1903, the Mohawk Institute was rebuilt in 1904 as the imposing, three-storey red-brick building that still stands today. Constructed behind the building that burned down, it was set even farther back from the road. The year after it was completed, there were fifty-four boys and fifty-four girls living within its walls.¹²⁰ The new school was designed with elements of the Beaux-Arts style commonly used for public and commercial architecture in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a mode that was “grand and theatrical, monumental and self-confident.”¹²¹ The Mohawk Institute’s new building presented a more modest interpretation of the style than the train stations and other large public buildings of the time, but its front elevation embodied this quality of grandiosity in its central, two-storey portico composed of four colossal Doric columns (figure 6.10). It also possessed characteristics of Edwardian classicism, such as the cupola, five arched dormers, balustrade, and quoins on the corners. Abandoning the domestic character, Gothic adornment, and irregularity of the previous structure, the new building was characterized by order, symmetry, and a more daunting, institutional appearance that seemed to defy its precursor’s destruction.

Like its Georgian and Victorian predecessors, the Mohawk Institute’s new stylistic iteration signified connections to the British Empire and reinforced a colonial narrative of dominance and superiority through its size and classical references.¹²² Its scale and monumentality were emphasized in school photographs that used the front facade as a backdrop, such as a 1930s image depicting students standing in ten variously sized rows on the stairs and porch, with staff seated in front (figure 6.11).¹²³ The columns appear gigantic, dwarfing the children standing between and in front of them. “At first glance,” notes Sherry Farrell Racette, “many photographs of children in residential schools are indistinguishable from the broader genre of school photography.”¹²⁴ Many of these images, however, reveal the measures used by these institutions to break students’ individuality: identical uniforms, similar haircuts, and grouping children by age and sex. The Eurocentric architecture in the Mohawk Institute photograph emphasizes these strategies of conformity as well as signalling the institution’s colonial purpose of transforming children into non-Indigenous subjects.¹²⁵

Survivors’ recollections are key to understanding how the architectural spaces of the Mohawk Institute were experienced. These narratives are much more readily accessible for the post-1904 era than for earlier phases, thanks to written accounts and oral histories such as those collected in Elizabeth Graham’s The Mush Hole: Life at Two Indian Residential Schools.¹²⁶ This testimony goes beyond official records and what can be gleaned from visual sources to convey students’ perspectives on and lived experiences in the built environment. The overwhelming size of residential school buildings characterize the memories of many survivors, especially those who first arrived as small children. A survivor who was brought to the Mohawk Institute in 1940 as a four-and-a-half-year-old child relates, “All I remember is a great big building with great big walls. I remember crying. I was confused—scared.”¹²⁷ To young children who had just been separated from their families, the “monumental” architecture appeared threatening, alluding to the power that staff and teachers would have over their lives.

Arriving at the Mohawk Institute and entering the building for the first time was a significant event for many children. Coming with siblings often meant being separated from them right away, particularly those of the opposite sex. In survivor Marie Hess’s fictionalized account of her experiences, the young protagonist arrives with her brothers and sisters to the “towering” building, which she perceives as an “enormous house.” But their older brother reminds them, “this is not our home,” warning that “you must always remember to follow the rules here. I’m not sure if I’ll be close enough to help you any more.”

He catches his brothers’ and sisters’ eyes one by one as they nervously climb the stairs to the front entrance. As they entered the heavy doors, they were quickly ushered away into different rooms. Noreen could hear her brother telling the woman in a white uniform and cap, “we don’t have bugs, none of us do.”¹²⁸

Hess’s account reveals the emotional resonance of the architecture: The school is an “enormous house” that is not a home, lacking the comfort and security of family and community. The enormity of the exterior yields to an immense interior, parts of which are off-limits, into which the siblings are swiftly sorted. When she can no longer see her brother, Noreen can hear his voice as he speaks to the school nurse, foreshadowing the fragmented relationship between many siblings inside the institution.

The segregation and surveillance of children within the main building of the Mohawk Institute was enabled by its plan, which was I-shaped and symmetrical, with a narrower central section flanked by two wings. When the building was first completed, children going through the main entrance would have encountered offices, the sewing room, and bedrooms for female staff on the ground floor. Down a corridor to the left, the west wing had a classroom, master’s (teacher’s) room, and farm men’s bedrooms; to the right, the east wing comprised another classroom and an assembly room. Upstairs, the boys’ and girls’ dormitories were in the east and west wings, separated by the principal’s family residence and two sickrooms in the central block.¹²⁹ The attic was left unfinished until it was partially renovated into dormitories in 1929.¹³⁰

The origin of the building’s design can be traced both to the Mohawk Institute’s specificity as an Anglican residential school and the broader architectural culture of the time. According to Scott, the building was designed by Principal Ashton and his son, Ernest.¹³¹ Given what was by that time the principal’s thirty-year career at the Mohawk Institute, it is conceivable that he contributed detailed ideas about how it should be rebuilt and had significant influence over its final form, especially its program and layout. He was also, in all likelihood, influenced by his early experiences as schoolmaster at the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham, outside London, England.¹³² However, the NEC also enlisted the aid of an architecture firm called Stewart, Stewart & Taylor, which was active in Hamilton and Brantford from 1902 to 1904.¹³³ In this short time, the firm completed at least four projects in Brantford, including the Beaux-Arts Carnegie Library on George Street.¹³⁴ The library and the Mohawk Institute were vastly different in use and size, but their exteriors share many stylistic features, such as their symmetry, rusticated and raised first stories, monumental entrances with classical columns, pediments, and central domes. These aesthetic similarities are superficial, but they speak to the entanglement of the Mohawk Institute’s architecture, and that of residential schools more generally, with broader settler-colonial architectural cultures.¹³⁵ These institutions’ shared architectural symbolism referred to civic enlightenment and Eurocentric notions of progress, which in the case of the library helped increase public access to knowledge, but at the Mohawk Institute manifested as an active suppression of Indigenous ways of being and knowing.¹³⁶

Consistent with the Mohawk Institute’s history as a “model” or “pattern” institution, the 1904 building may have served as an architectural template for later residential schools. The school was built at the beginning of a transition period, lasting from about 1905 to 1923, when boarding and industrial schools were both now referred to by the government as “residential schools.” In 1911, the government introduced contracts with the churches, which offered higher per capita grants to institutions that met certain criteria for their physical plant.¹³⁷ The Indian Affairs report for that year declared that “under the new contract arrangement improvements have been undertaken at the Mohawk Institute and at Mount Elgin, which are designed to make these institutions model ones in every respect.”¹³⁸

The centralization of government power over residential schools led Indian Affairs to assume increased involvement in the design of new buildings and additions. Two early government-built institutions that show the influence of the Mohawk Institute are the Portage La Prairie residential school in Manitoba, designed by Jean Dosithe Chene in 1914, and the Chapleau (St. John’s) residential school in Ontario, designed by Roland Guerney Orr in 1919.¹³⁹ Orr became chief architect of Indian Affairs in 1921, and in the following decade and a half, designed around two dozen new residential schools, often replacements for older buildings.¹⁴⁰ Although he moved away from Beaux-Arts and Edwardian exteriors, he kept the I-shaped plan and general interior arrangement found at the Mohawk Institute.

Just as the Mohawk Institute may have served as a prototype for the residential school system at large, its inclusion in this colonial network in turn influenced its own physical form. In 1913, D. C. Scott, then superintendent of Indian education, wrote that “the location of the dining-room in the basement is very objectionable” and asked the departmental architect to prepare plans for a new dining room, among other renovations.¹⁴¹ Like most Indian Affairs construction projects, this addition was delayed by the First World War. It was not until 1922 that Orr designed a new rear wing for the building, a feature that brought its form in line with new government-designed residential schools elsewhere.¹⁴² The plans included a dining room and service spaces in the basement, as well as an assembly hall above it on the ground floor (a de facto chapel, since it had a platform with an altar on one end) (see figures 6.12 and 6.13).

The ground-floor part of the addition was never built because the school continued to use the nearby Mohawk Chapel for weekly religious services.¹⁴³ As survivor Jennie Blackbird recalled, the existing senior classroom also doubled as a space for “chapel service every evening after supper.”¹⁴⁴ Thus, despite the church being located away from the school, daily religious activities still took place in a room borrowed for the purpose. The new rear wing did incorporate a large, open dining room, laundry, kitchen, boiler room, coal bin, and small storage room in the basement. The renovations also included new boys’ and girls’ lavatories in the existing basement, as well as the installation of steam heating throughout the building. A survivor who attended the Mohawk Institute during the 1920s, Harrison Burning, remembered the construction, suggesting that the children saw the renovations as a significant event.¹⁴⁵ Orr, the Indian Affairs architect, visited the building site on several occasions while the project was being built and continued to correspond with the principal afterwards.¹⁴⁶ He also wrote to Scott about seemingly minute matters of repairs and alterations to the building, such as replacing ladders with steel stair fire escapes in 1930. The involvement of Scott—now the deputy superintendent general of Indians affairs—suggests the tight control he wielded over the department and individual residential schools, as well as the Mohawk Institute’s increasing enmeshment with a centralized government bureaucracy.

Survivors’ Experiences of Segregation, Discipline, Labour, and Play

The built environment, from the smallest room to the institutional landscape as a whole, was an inextricable part of children’s experiences at the Mohawk Institute. Learning through survivors’ own words how they understood and navigated this environment offers an invaluable perspective on the institution’s architectural history. Gender segregation was a remarkably consistent feature of survivors’ memories, even those who attended decades apart, and not only in architecturally separated spaces like the dormitories. Martha Hill, who was at the school from 1912 to 1918, related that “the girls played with the girls over here, and the boys played with the boys. The only time you might say we was mixed together was when we went into church, because there wasn’t enough seats. . . . But even our dining-rooms—our dining-room was here—the boys dining-room over there.”¹⁴⁷ Vera Styres recounted that, in the 1940s, the institution constituted two distinct spheres: “I don’t know too much about what happened on the boys’ side, as the boys and girls were kept separate. Even in the classroom the girls sat on one side and the boys sat on the other side.”¹⁴⁸ The one exception to this strict segregation, aside from church, was the visitors’ room, where brothers and sisters could talk for a short time at designated times. In the 1940s, “once a month the brothers and sisters were allowed to visit in the visiting room on a Wednesday night,” recalled Jennie Blackbird. “I was allowed to visit with the three I went there with, which was nice.”¹⁴⁹ Marguerite Beaver remembers that, around the same time, “we could speak with our brothers—on Thursday nights, in turn when your name came up. . . . We used to have to go up in the front—we used to call it the Visitor’s Room and I think we could talk to them three minutes, or five minutes.”¹⁵⁰

As in earlier phases of the institution, official records and visual sources such as photographs and plans leave out how staff used certain spaces to subject children to extremes of institutional discipline: incarceration and physical violence. These hidden or informal uses, though not listed in reports or marked on plans, were integral to the social control enacted at the Mohawk Institute. Spaces of confinement were in use not long after the school was rebuilt, as a government official detailed in 1907: “I cannot say that I was favorably impressed with the sight of two prison cells in the boys [sic] play house. I was informed, however, that these were for pupils who ran away from the institution, confinement being made for a week at a time when pupils returned.”¹⁵¹ The phrase “prison cells” indicates that the purpose of these spaces for confinement was clearly legible. Martha Hill describes a similar space in the main building during the 1910s:

They had one little room—it had just had room to crawl in and go in the bed if you done anything wrong. That’s how [the principal would] punish you—he’d make you go in that room. No light—shut the door and lock it from the outside. You couldn’t get out of there and you had to stay in there for so many hours. Of course, after Turnell took it over he just closed that room up for good.¹⁵²

Despite Hill’s recollection that the room was no longer used once Cyril Turnell became principal in 1915, survivors of later periods continued to be confined in other ways. One survivor, who was at the Mohawk Institute from 1940 to 1945, remembers being “thrown in the clothes closet” with another young student. “I guess we were thrown in there for speaking Indian,” she recalled.¹⁵³ This punishment reinforced the genocidal aim of depriving children of their Indigenous languages, associating their use with confinement and isolation. Blackbird did not experience confinement but remembered hearing of such practices: “While there I did hear of rumours, if some child did something really wrong, they was put in solitary confinement and was locked up for three days, no lights in the room. A room—I believe four by four?—with only water three times a day. It was a dark room.”¹⁵⁴

In addition to confinement and food deprivation, many survivors remembered frequent physical punishments. Blackbird recalled leaving the institution with some other girls and getting as far as the orchard before they were caught and “strapped” by the principal: “The strappings were always in the visiting room.”¹⁵⁵ Blackbird’s account has a haunting resonance with the earlier account of prison cells in the boys’ playhouse: punishments were enacted in spaces that also held positive associations. As they enjoyed their rare leisure time in the playhouse, boys may have been reminded of the severe consequences of absconding from school; as they spoke with siblings during short meetings in the visiting room, children may have remembered a punishment meted out to them or others in the same space. On arriving at the Mohawk Institute from Walpole Island in 1943, Sylvia Soney remembered “getting an orientation—going into the visitors’ room and being told what the rules were.”¹⁵⁶ This spatial overlap between discipline and recreation (or time with family) no doubt created an atmosphere of constant vigilance, cautioning students to ensure that their behaviour followed staff expectations at all times.

The children’s labour, as with other parts of the Mohawk Institute, was spatially segregated by gender. The girls were largely restricted to the main building, working in the laundry, kitchen, and sewing room, as well as cleaning throughout. A photograph from 1943 shows five girls in front of a wood-panelled wall with a grid of “cubbyholes” in the sewing room, which was on the ground floor of the girls’ wing (figure 6.14). On Soney’s first day at the school, she recalled, “my sister and I were taken over to the sewing room and my brother went wherever he went, and there was a lady there and she gave us our number and showed us where our little box would be where every Saturday we’d get clean clothes.”¹⁵⁷ The photograph shows neatly folded items in the boxes, which are labelled with the numbers the institution used to identify each child. The built-in cabinetry echoes the girls’ dress: identical and anonymous. The image is clearly staged, with sewing machines angled so that the girls are visible and naturally lit from the window to their right. Such photographs of sewing rooms at residential schools promoted the idea that what female students learned in their half day of work had practical value. As Racette observes, “while photographs of both genders focus on the acquisition of useful skills, images of girls emphasize docility, industry, and neatness. Girls were most often photographed in the sewing room, and less often in the kitchen. They were never photographed in the laundry room or scrubbing floors, which actually constituted the bulk of their work.”¹⁵⁸

Though absent from the photographic record, the ceaseless cleaning done by girls at the Mohawk Institute is well-documented in survivors’ oral histories. While doing this work, they often transgressed physical boundaries into parts of the building that were normally off-limits. Marjorie J. Groat, who entered the Mohawk Institute in 1928, remembered working “in the Principal’s department” on the second floor, a space that was accessed by its own stairwell and thus isolated from the rest of the building.¹⁵⁹ The principal’s private apartment included a living room and den that opened onto the second-storey veranda over the main entrance, a dining room, a small kitchen with a dumbwaiter connected to the staff dining room below, a lavatory, and four bedrooms.¹⁶⁰ Doors on either end of the hallway led to the children’s sleeping areas. Referring to the girls’ domestic work in the principal’s home, survivor Edward S. Groat declared that “they had built-in servants.”¹⁶¹ Another normally restricted area that girls entered in the course of their work was the boys’ side of the building, as Soney experienced during the 1940s: “One of my duties was to scrub either the dormitory or a section of the boys’ dormitory, and when I was over there I could look out of the window and see the boys a couple of storeys below, and oftentimes in the spring or fall they would be like little dustballs, fighting. . . . Another job I had was to scrub a row in the junior schoolroom or senior schoolroom.”¹⁶² Domestic labour such as laundry, cooking, serving, sewing, mending, and cleaning was largely done by female students and defined their spatial experience of the Mohawk Institute. Many of these activities had dedicated spaces within the building, but cleaning extended throughout the interior, even to places that were usually inaccessible. Although scrubbing and washing are visually absent in archival photographs of the Mohawk Institute, these were integral to the functioning of the institution and constituted some of the most common activities remembered by women survivors.

Like earlier in its history, the Mohawk Institute’s landscape of labour extended well beyond the confines of the main building, which sat at the centre of 350 acres of agricultural land. It was mainly boys who worked in the fields and outbuildings, including barns for crops and livestock, horse stables, chicken coop, greenhouses, and carpentry shop. The farm and trades structures were largely grouped behind the main building, an arrangement that implied the importance of classroom learning over manual labour. In this context, the school building could be seen as a kind of disguise, an image the church and government projected to shield the working landscape from the view of passersby. A side view of the grounds from 1917, however, reveals that the farm structures rivalled the main building in size, reflecting the importance of this landscape to the half-day labour system. The vast fields in the foreground, accentuated by the diminutive ploughman and team of horses, evoke the ceaseless work demanded of the children. Peter Smith recalled, “we worked on the farm, we were hungry all the time.”¹⁶³ Many survivors remembered hard labour, with the products of their efforts rarely ending up on their plates.

The Mohawk Institute’s productive landscape was represented by Russ Moses, who attended the institution from 1942 to 1947, in a detailed site plan drawn from memory in 1999 (see figure 0.4 in “Russ Moses Residential School Memoir,” near the beginning of this book). The circle at the end of the drive is at the centre of the image, alluding to its significance in arrivals at and departures from the institution. The main building is adjacent to the circle, and these two elements act as a kind of fulcrum around which other parts of the landscape revolve. Yet the circle and the school are small compared to the apple orchards, vegetable gardens, and farmlands surrounding them, suggesting that these were even more significant in the children’s experience of the place. Indeed, Moses recalled that everyone worked the land: children under Grade 5 “worked in the market garden in which every type of vegetable was grown and in the main sold,” while “the senior boys worked on the farm—and I mean worked, we were underfed, ill clad and out in all types of weather.”¹⁶⁴ The orchard between the main building and the street continues to be a distinguishing feature of the site, but its apples were as inaccessible to the children as other produce. Soney remembered that “there was an apple orchard next to our playground, and the only way you’d get any of them was to climb the fence, and then it was considered stealing and you’d get into trouble. But they were the Mohawk Institute’s orchards.”¹⁶⁵ As Moses’s and Soney’s testimonies show, children were often alienated from the food they grew, generating an added sense of injustice about the institution’s theft of their labour.

Despite the hard physical work and deprivation that children endured at the Mohawk Institute, they also occasionally experienced this usually harsh environment through play. A few areas of the institution were designated for recreation, either purpose-built or appropriated by children for their amusement. In Moses’s drawing, we see that boys’ and girls’ experiences of play were as spatially segregated as their labour. West of the driveway circle was the girls’ fenced playground, which, as indicated by Soney, bordered the orchard in front of the main building. Smith remembered that the girls were mostly limited to this area: “the girls were kinda restricted—in a fenced-in playground. If they went out some place they took 25 of them in a bunch.”¹⁶⁶ By contrast, the open “play area” behind the main building, presumably for the boys, appeared to have no defined boundaries. Smith recalled playing hide-and-seek throughout the grounds in the 1920s and ’30s:

Right after supper you’d take right off and you had till 8 o’clock. We’d run right off and go some place. . . . One night we were playing by the Mohawk lake, and we were being chased and they saw them coming from all three sides, and we jumped right in the Mohawk lake, and there were water snakes, and everybody swam right across the lake—with all their clothes on!!! We really laughed about that. We used to swim back of the chapel at noon time. At the weekends we’d go right back on the Henry property, and the water was deep back there.¹⁶⁷

Soney remembers similarly unsupervised time to play, but her recollection lacks the expansiveness and exuberance of Smith’s testimony, suggesting a more confined experience:

We spent a lot of time that was unsupervised, just entertaining ourselves in the playroom or outside. Whatever we did there we basically entertained ourselves. There was nothing down there—it was a cement floor playroom and there were lockers around the edges, or boxes, but there was really nothing there—you know how a basement looks with those columns. We’d play tag and hide-and-go-seek, and go into another room and tell ghost stories.¹⁶⁸

While some boys found respite in moving throughout and even beyond the grounds, the girls used the spaces provided to them, where “there was nothing,” and reappropriated them for playing games and telling stories. Though starkly different, both boys’ and girls’ spatial reimagination of the Mohawk Institute for play demonstrates the children’s resilience and inventiveness in surviving its harsh institutional environment.

Postwar Reforms

Reforms to the residential school system following the Second World War manifested, in part, as an extensive government construction program to renew the system’s aging building stock. Even after a special joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons recommended integrating First Nations children into public schools, new, modernist residential schools replaced dilapidated buildings, while many existing schools were renovated and had new additions built.¹⁶⁹ These projects can be seen in terms of the progressive, liberal image the government wished to cultivate as it, in theory, moved away from paternalism toward integration and citizenship—a change many First Nations saw as continued efforts at assimilation. At the Mohawk Institute, postwar reforms to the built environment were influenced partly by these larger national trends, but also by more localized circumstances. In 1946, the number of children at the institution increased because of the closure of the Mount Elgin residential school 120 kilometres west.¹⁷⁰ The NEC also withdrew financial support, leading to local concerns about poor conditions. In February 1946, The Windsor Daily Star reported that the Brantford Women’s Council had lodged a complaint with Indian Affairs about inadequate clothing and educational facilities at the school, followed by the promise of “a full investigation” from the government.¹⁷¹

Indian Affairs made incremental improvements to the Mohawk Institute in the following years based on two reports detailing substantial deficiencies. The first revealed major problems with the electrical system, particularly in the 1904 building, which posed significant safety hazards.¹⁷² Plans for an overhaul were prepared in July 1948.¹⁷³ The second report contained a scathing account of the children’s living conditions. In several hand-written pages, an Indian Affairs official, C. A. F. Clark, described washrooms with no partitions between toilets, broken or missing toilet seats, and communal roller towels instead of personal towels—conditions under which “dignity and decency aren’t getting much consideration” and which “would by ordinary white standards be called degrading.”¹⁷⁴ The accompanying photos showed narrow beds crowded together, as well as toilets open to the children’s sleeping spaces. Clark recommended improving the washrooms and expanding the dormitories into the central attic space, which was still unfinished, to alleviate overcrowding. Yet aside from improving the physical environment, he made these recommendations with the aim of transforming the children within it, suggesting that the dormitory “should approximate more the home bedroom if it is to train pupils in looking after their own things and leaving other people’s things alone.”¹⁷⁵ He summed up his aim: “to create a physical environment which will help rather than hinder the process of conditioning the inmates, many of whom constitute a challenge to the abilities of such staff members as we can attract. . . . The conditions are not good enough for a school whose objective is to raise the cultural and moral level of children who have already had a lower-than-average start.”¹⁷⁶ Although the report implied that a better physical environment would assist staff in “improving” and assimilating the children under their care, it also brought to light the derelict state of the building and forced government action.

The architectural remnants of the Second World War played a role in postwar change in some First Nations communities and institutions like residential schools, which minimized government costs in providing infrastructure.¹⁷⁷ By the time of the Clark report, huts from the No. 20 Canadian Army (Basic) Training Centre, which operated in Brantford from 1940 to 1945, had been moved to the grounds of the Mohawk Institute. Located directly south of the main building, the huts were connected and renovated into a classroom block (figure 6.16).¹⁷⁸ Clark included a photograph of one of the three classrooms in his report, suggesting that “we should add a fourth while army buildings are available” (figure 6.17). Yet he also noted that in the photo, “in the desk nearest the door an under-age child is sleeping. We should have a real primary room.”¹⁷⁹ In addition to generally inadequate conditions, the report thus revealed a lack of proper facilities for very young children who were taken to the institution. In 1949, another former military building, an army camp chapel, was moved to the front of the property, close to the driveway entrance on Mohawk Street. The chapel was converted into a two-classroom block, and, by 1953, all classroom activities were taking place in these former military buildings.¹⁸⁰

The principal’s accommodations also changed significantly in the mid-twentieth century. Clark’s report recommended expanding the children’s dormitories into the unused central attic space, which was located above the principal’s apartment. The supervisor of vocational training for Indian Affairs, A. J. Doucet, noted that “there is a great deal of space lost in the middle of this school. This is due, I believe, to the fact that the Principal would be reluctant to have dormitories above his own living quarters.”¹⁸¹ The crowded conditions in the children’s dormitories were thus created, at least partly, to maintain the principal’s comfort—a spatial inscription of racial hierarchies similar to those of the dining areas noted in earlier parts of the institution’s history. Nevertheless, plans for expanding the dormitories were prepared in 1949, and the design provided for finishing the central attic space as well as renovating the existing dormitories. Also added at this time were the two octagonal windows visible in the pedimented dormers on the exterior of the building. The renovation included a new staff bedroom with its own toilet, as well as a nurse’s room. These rooms increased surveillance by installing staff on the attic floor, as well as providing a buffer between the new boys’ and girls’ dormitories.¹⁸² The principal’s residence was finally moved to a detached house on the grounds in 1952 and the vacated space on the second floor was converted into nine staff bedrooms with a shared washroom.¹⁸³ The new house, still extant on the site, had a two-car garage and could be accessed by a driveway off the road leading to the main building. As part of this reconfiguration, the main building’s two-storey porch, formerly accessed from the principal’s apartment on the second floor, was reduced to one storey.

The plans of the 1952 renovations are of note because they refer to the visiting room near the entrance as the “Indian reception room.”¹⁸⁴ This terminology complements survivors’ testimonies of their experiences visiting siblings in this room by revealing it as a space that was explicitly racially segregated. Although parents and other visiting family members would have entered through the front door, their physical and visual access to the building would have likely stopped at the reception room.¹⁸⁵ The addition of a small washroom with a single sink and toilet, despite an existing staff washroom down the hall, suggests the importance that Indian Affairs and school authorities placed on preventing family members from moving beyond the reception room. The washroom played into the creation and maintenance of racial hierarchies through segregated facilities, which occurred in various contexts in twentieth-century Canada.¹⁸⁶

The incremental changes of the immediate postwar period were followed by several significant projects at the Mohawk Institute in the late 1950s and ’60s. These included a new classroom building, kitchen addition, and an outdoor pool. As with many architectural changes since the 1920s, these modifications related to Indian Affairs’ centralized approach to residential school design, bringing the physical plant in line with that of other institutions in the federal system. However, they can also be read in the newer context of efforts toward equality, if not equity, between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada. The government saw investments in education, including architecture, as advancing these aims, even if the system itself continued to be inequitable given the ongoing separation of children from their families and communities, as well as its Eurocentric curriculum. The 1956 report of a commission on federal educational facilities for Indigenous children exposed a system that was physically crumbling, and its recommendations amounted to an extensive, national building program intended to facilitate integration.¹⁸⁷ The new four-classroom block completed at the Mohawk Institute in 1959 was a direct result of this report. Built to the north of the main building, the one-storey, flat-roofed classroom building contained two regular classrooms and two specialized classrooms for manual training and domestic science, along with a gymnasium, locker rooms, and offices.¹⁸⁸ The minister of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration officiated at the inauguration of the new building, signifying the political utility of such investments.

The major projects of the 1960s fed into the government’s “modernization” narrative with regards to its relations with Indigenous peoples. The renovation of the Mohawk Institute’s dining room and the construction of an extensive kitchen addition in 1961 was a subject of such modernization discourse. In its annual report, the government declared that “the Mohawk Institute at Brantford benefitted from the first phase of extensive alterations designed to make it a modern residential school. The new kitchen and dining-room alterations which cost more than $100,000 provide facilities for feeding all students.”¹⁸⁹ The theme of modernization was also emphasized in a photograph published in The Brantford Expositor, staged to show a staff member and student preparing food at a stainless-steel island with a variety of kitchen implements (figure 6.18). Behind them hovers Principal Zimmerman, who was quoted as saying that the project was part of efforts to create a “homey atmosphere” at the institution. According to the accompanying text, the new kitchen was “gleaming and efficient,” “well-equipped and completely fireproof,” with “many of the latest automatic facilities.” Such descriptions were intended to show off these improvements to a larger public. The text made sure to specify that the renovations were “financed by the federal government,” and Zimmerman stated in the article that he intended to hold an “official open house” when the project was completed.¹⁹⁰ Recalling Goffman’s notion of “institutional display,” the architectural and technological improvements showcased at the Mohawk Institute doubled as government propaganda.

While the classroom building and kitchen addition still exist today, only a trace remains of another postwar addition: an outdoor swimming pool tucked into the corner formed by the dining room and laundry. According to survivor testimony, this pool was used once a week by children who did not go home but remained at the institution over the summer.¹⁹¹ Two square-format snapshots from June 1965 show a group of girls playing in the pool, then lining up in the water and on the deck to pose for the camera.¹⁹² Behind the girls is a short fence, which probably wrapped around the entire pool. These images suggest that the use of the pool, like so many other aspects of the institution’s constructed environment, was segregated by gender. It was, nevertheless, a source of enjoyment and respite for those who were forced to stay throughout the year. Kelly Curley, who was at the Mohawk Institute in 1969, right before it closed, recalled that going swimming “was one of the things we looked forward to in the summertime.”¹⁹³

In 1969, the federal government took operational control of residential schools away from the churches and turned them into residences, from which children were sent to schools in nearby settler communities.¹⁹⁴ This change also occurred at the Mohawk Institute and came with programs in Indigenous languages and traditions that had once been suppressed by the schools. The federal ownership did not last long; control of many schools was relinquished to nearby Indigenous communities, regardless of the community’s relationship to a particular school. The Mohawk Institute reverted to Six Nations of the Grand River, whose elected council still owns the building today. At its foundation, the school operated to serve children from Six Nations, but in 1965, only fifteen residents from that community remained. The rest, including over one hundred from Quebec, came from sparsely populated northern areas where day schools had not yet been built.¹⁹⁵

Upon the full-fledged closure of the Mohawk Institute in 1969, G. D. Cromb, director of the Education Branch of Indian Affairs, commented that “it is the firm opinion of this Department that the children will receive better care in their own homes under the guidance of their parents than they would in residence.”¹⁹⁶ This attitude was an about-face from the views expressed throughout the Mohawk Institute’s entire history, with no special explanation or acknowledgement. The same year, the former Mohawk Institute was repurposed by the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians as the Woodland Indian Cultural Education Centre (known since 1988 as the Woodland Cultural Centre), which has developed a museum and library and offers programming in arts, Indigenous languages, and education. The community’s takeover of the building and transformation of its purpose—from a site of cultural genocide to one of cultural resurgence—is an exemplar of what Māori planning scholar Hirini Matunga describes as “quiet narrative” Indigenous architecture: an “architecture of necessity” and “of retrofit and repurpose” that relates a “poignant story of Indigenous survival in the modern era.”¹⁹⁷ The structure’s new identity as a cultural centre was opposed to its original use as a residential school, yet the site’s complex history has continued to inform the understanding and interpretation of its built environment.¹⁹⁸

Conclusion

The architecture of the Mohawk Institute has a history as long as the institution itself, as well as over five decades since the closure of the residential school. An important phase of its spatial history, which merits its own historical study, is its reuse as the Woodland Cultural Centre by nine original member communities in 1972 and the current support communities of Wahta, Tyendinaga, and Six Nations of the Grand River. This history, as well as the restoration and commemoration of the former residential school’s main building, represent two major directions for future study. The community-led Save the Evidence campaign has recognized the importance of the built fabric of the institution as a form of testimony that, alongside that of survivors, will help ensure that the tragic history of the Mohawk Institute is never forgotten.

This chapter has shown that the study of the Mohawk Institute’s architecture can reveal much about the experiences of the children who were taken there, as well as the intentions of government and church officials in the fine-grain operation of the residential school system. While serving as a model for residential schools across Canada, the Mohawk Institute was itself influenced by its inclusion in this national system. The built environment played a significant role in the school’s program of cultural genocide, enabling punishments, social control, and reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies. Many similarities persisted in the creation and organization of the built environment across the different phases of the institution’s history, despite their distinct architectural identities. Gender segregation, uncompensated child labour on construction and maintenance, spaces of confinement and punishment, and an expansive but segregated landscape of work were some of the spatial continuities throughout the Mohawk Institute’s history. With each architectural phase, we can interpret the built environment using an additional type of evidence, from textual sources, to visual sources such as photographs and plans, to survivor testimony. Children’s experiences of the institution, not unexpectedly, emerge most clearly through the oral histories of survivors. These experiences were highly spatial, and survivors’ recollections are often firmly situated within the complex constructed environment that contained them.

The Mohawk Institute’s architecture is a crucial vessel for these stories, standing as a silent witness, alongside the testimony of survivors, to the hardships of the residential school era. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of the institution’s built environment in the present are the many inscriptions by students of names, dates, and other messages on the bricks of the main building and hidden places inside. These marks, inscribed into the very material of the former residential school, speak to descendants and visitors of the presence, resistance, and survival of the children and honour those who did not survive. As the transformation of the Mohawk Institute continues into the future, it will serve as an important “site of conscience”¹⁹⁹ that concretizes residential school history more broadly and commemorates the struggles of the children who were there.

Notes

An early version of this chapter was part of my master’s thesis completed at the University of Waterloo. A more recent version was workshopped in Professor Itohan Osayimwese’s “Race and Architecture” course at Brown University in fall 2021. I would like to thank Dr. Osayimwese, Dr. Felipe Hernández, and the students for their thoughtful feedback. Thank you also to the editors of the present volume for their invitation to participate in the project and their support in completing this chapter.

1. 1 Janet Wright, Crown Assets: The Architecture of the Department of Public Works, 1867–1967 (University of Toronto Press, 1997), 61.

2. 2 Geoffrey Paul Carr, “‘House of No Spirit’: An Architectural History of the Indian Residential School in British Columbia” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2011), 12. See also Geoffrey Carr, “Atopoi of the Modern: Revisiting the Place of the Indian Residential School,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, no. 1 (2009): 109–35; Geoffrey Carr, “Educating Memory: Regarding the Remnants of the Indian Residential School,” Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 34, no. 2 (2009): 87–99.

3. 3 Carr, “‘House of No Spirit,’” 43.

4. 4 For further scholarship on the architecture of residential schools in Canada and the United States, see Hugh James Bitz, “School-House: Additions and Renovations to White Calf Collegiate; Lebret, Saskatchewan” (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 1997); Sandra U. Dielissen, “Teaching a School to Talk: Archaeology of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Home for Indian Children” (master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2012); Christopher T. Green, “A Stage Set for Assimilation: The Model Indian School at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Winterthur Portfolio 51, nos. 2–3 (2017): 95–133; Emily Elizabeth Turner, “Mission Infrastructure Development in the Canadian North, c. 1850–1920” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2018); Jennifer N. Harvey, “Landscapes of Conversion: The Evolution of the Residential School Sites at Wiikwemkoong and Spanish, Ontario” (master’s thesis, Laurentian University, 2019); Trina Cooper-Bolam, “Workhouses and Residential Schools: From Institutional Models to Museums,” in Cybercartography in a Reconciliation Community, ed. D. R. Fraser Taylor and Stephanie Pyne (Elsevier, 2019), 143–66; Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, “On the Silence of the Colonial Archive: Examining Sensorial Agency Through the Archival Drawings of Indian Residential Schools in Canada,” in The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models, ed. Federica Goffi (Routledge, 2022), 460–75.

5. 5 Sarah de Leeuw, “Intimate Colonialisms: The Material and Experienced Places of British Columbia’s Residential Schools,” Canadian Geographer 51, no. 3 (2007): 343.

6. 6 Jacqueline Fear-Segal, “Carlisle Campus: Landscape of Race and Erasure,” in White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 184–205.

7. 7 Fear-Segal, 185–6.

8. 8 Jo-Anne Fiske, “Placing Violence Against First Nations Children: The Use of Space and Place to Construct the (In)Credible Violated Subject,” in Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, ed. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis (UBC Press, 2009), 152.

9. 9 Mary Louise Pratt describes contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” Mary Louise Pratt, “Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992), 7.

10. 10 Frank Eames, Pioneer Schools of Upper Canada (reprinted from Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records, vol. 18 [1920?]), 5.

11. 11 The school, conducted by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, was later moved to New Hampshire, where it became Dartmouth College. Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse University Press, 1984), 71–2.

12. 12 Rick Monture, We Share Our Matters = Teionkwakhashion Tsi Niionkwariho:Ten: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River (University of Manitoba Press, 2014), 31–2.

13. 13 The British Crown built the Mohawk Chapel in 1785 in thanks for the Kanyen’kehaka’s support during the American Revolution and as a replacement for the place of worship built by Queen Anne in 1711 in the Kanyen’kehaka homelands of the Mohawk Valley, which were taken over by the American rebels. Originally called St. Paul’s, the chapel is known today as Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks. It is a National Historic Site and currently the oldest surviving church building in Ontario, as well as the only standing remnant of the village. Violet M. Holroyd, Foundations of Faith: Historic Religious Buildings of Ontario (Natural Heritage, 1991), 58.

14. 14 Monture, We Share Our Matters = Teionkwakhashion Tsi Niionkwariho:Ten, 32. Brant’s Kanyen’kehaka name, Thayendanegea, reflected a synthetic approach to culture in its meaning: “Two sticks of wood bound together” or “Two arrows bound together.” The first definition is found in Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 43, and the second was provided to me by Dr. William Woodworth / Raweno:kwas.

15. 15 This philosophy is, of course, also embodied in the Two Row Wampum. See Monture, We Share Our Matters = Teionkwakhashion Tsi Niionkwariho:Ten, 13–14.

16. 16 Camille Prevost and Sam Russell, “A Primer for the Use of the Mohawk Children,” Edith and Lorne Pierce Collection of Canadiana, Queen’s University Library, 2021, https://piercecanadiana.omeka.net/exhibits/show/mohawk-primer; Gus Richardson, “SAHONWAGY,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/sahonwagy_4E.html.

17. 17 W. Martha E. Cooke and Bruce G. Wilson, “Peachey, James,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/peachey_james_4E.html.

18. 18 Duncan Campbell Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” in Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended March 31, 1930 (F. A. Acland, 1931), 15.

19. 19 Aborigines Protection Society, Report on the Indians of Upper Canada (William Ball, Arnold, and Co., 1839), 5.

20. 20 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 15.

21. 21 Scott, 15. The possible use of a repurposed building early in the Mohawk Institute’s history reflects common practice in nineteenth-century institution-building for reasons of economy, but which may also have been advantageous by locating an unfamiliar institution in a familiar physical setting. See Marta Gutman, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 30–1; Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865–1914 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 52–6.

22. 22 Jennifer Pettit, “From Longhouse to Schoolhouse: The Mohawk Institute 1834–1970” (master’s thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1993), 55.

23. 23 Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), 278n143.

24. 24 Monture, We Share Our Matters = Teionkwakhashion Tsi Niionkwariho:Ten, 58.

25. 25 “November 1829 NEC Report: Lugger,” in Elizabeth Graham, The Mush Hole: Life at Two Indian Residential Schools (Heffle Publishing, 1997), 44.

26. 26 The phrase “Mechanics Institution” (or “Mechanics’ Institute”) may have been used interchangeably to refer to one specific building that was used for industrial or trades training, as well as to the school as a whole. Graham, The Mush Hole, 7, 44–5; Pettit, “From Longhouse to Schoolhouse,” 50.

27. 27 “29 April 1831 NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 45.

28. 28 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 16; “26 April 1834 NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 45; Cf. Miller, who writes that the residences were opened in 1833 and accommodated ten boys and ten girls. J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press, 1996), 73; See also Pettit, “From Longhouse to Schoolhouse,” 54.

29. 29 Emily Elizabeth Turner, “Mission Infrastructure Development in the Canadian North, c. 1850–1920” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2018), 16–19.

30. 30 “June 1833 NEC Report: Lugger,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 45.

31. 31 “26 April 1834 NEC Report,” in Graham, 45.

32. 32 Robert S. Allen, “The British Indian Department and the Frontier in North America, 1755–1830,” Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History, no. 14 (1975): 89, 99–100.

33. 33 “23 May 1835 NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 45.

34. 34 “1 February 1839 NEC Report,” in Graham, 47.

35. 35 “1839 NEC Report,” in Graham, 47.

36. 36 “29 August 1839 NEC Report: Treasurer to Nelles,” in Graham, 47.

37. 37 “29 August 1839 NEC Report: Treasurer to Nelles,” in Graham, 47.

38. 38 “26 May 1840 NEC Report”; “26 August 1840 NEC Report: Nelles,” in Graham, 48.

39. 39 One official recommended that the NEC exempt certain girls from this work and “allow them to be treated . . . as boarders at a white school are treated” so that they could be trained as teachers. “18 November 1837 Richardson to Busk,” in Graham, 46. See the chapter by Alison Norman in this volume for more on training girls to be teachers.

40. 40 “8 September 1834 NEC Report: Lugger Nellis [sic] Richardson,” in Graham, 45.

41. 41 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 16.

42. 42 “22 February 1844 NEC Report: Nelles”; “19 July 1844 NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 51.

43. 43 Pettit, “From Longhouse to Schoolhouse,” 55.

44. 44 “8 September 1834 NEC Report: Lugger Nellis [sic] Richardson,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 45.

45. 45 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 16; James Douglas Leighton, “The Development of Federal Indian Policy in Canada, 1840–1890” (PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 1975), 237.

46. 46 This recommendation was made by the chief superintendent of Indian Affairs. “Report on the Affairs of the Indians in Canada; submitted to the Honorable the Legislative Assembly, for their information,” Section III, Appendix (T.) in Journals of the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada, vol. VI (John C. Becket, 1847), n.p. [3].

47. 47 James Beaven, Recreations of a Long Vacation; or a Visit to Indian Missions in Upper Canada (James Burns; H. and A. Rowsell, 1846), 52–3.

48. 48 “Evidence of Mr. Superintendent Winnett, (respecting the Six Nations of the Grand River.),” Appendix No. 17 in “Report on the Affairs of the Indians in Canada,” n.p. [118].

49. 49 “NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 53.

50. 50 “NEC Report.”

51. 51 The fire goes unmentioned in the NEC reports republished in Graham’s The Mush Hole and Scott’s 1930 text. The Anglican Church of Canada’s web page on the Mohawk Institute, since removed, mentions a fire around 1854–9, while Jennifer Pettit writes that the fire occurred in 1858. Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 16; “10 June 1844 Six Nations Indians to NEC,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 51; “The Mohawk Institute—Brantford, ON,” Anglican Church of Canada, 23 September 2008, accessed 23 March 2021, http://www.anglican.ca/tr/histories/mohawk-institute/; Pettit, “From Longhouse to Schoolhouse,” 59; Jennifer Loretta Pettit, “‘To Christianize and Civilize’: Native Industrial Schools in Canada” (PhD diss., University of Calgary, 1997), 25.

52. 52 This colour of brick was common in the area and known regionally as “white brick.” Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June, 1896 (Printed by S.E. Dawson, Printer to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1897). See also Harold Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1994), 289.

53. 53 “NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 53.

54. 54 Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:146–60.

55. 55 Kalman, 1:146.

56. 56 Kalman, 1:139.

57. 57 John J. G. Blumenson, Ontario Architecture: A Guide to Styles and Building Terms, 1784 to the Present (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1990), 5.

58. 58 Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:139.

59. 59 Johnson was an Irish colonial administrator, enslaver, and influential British superintendent of Indian Affairs in the province of New York, while Brant was a Kanyen’kehaka leader and the stepsister of Joseph Brant. Some historians have evaluated Johnson in a less-than-favourable light vis-à-vis his relationship with Indigenous peoples; for instance, Gwyn writes that “he was indeed one of their principal exploiters.” Julian Gwyn, “Johnson, Sir William,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/johnson_william_4E.html; Heather Conn, “Mary Brant (Konwatsi’tsiaiénni),” in Canadian Encyclopedia, 20 August 2019, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/mary-brant.

60. 60 Thank you to Dr. William Woodworth / Raweno:kwas for teaching me about Johnson Hall and drawing my attention to its significance in the Haudenosaunee narrative.

61. 61 See, for instance, “23 December 1872 NEC Report: Committee,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 74.

62. 62 This was more so the case at Protestant institutions like the Mohawk Institute; Roman Catholic residential schools were usually run with a gender-segregated administration, depending on the religious order running the school.

63. 63 I consider verandas here as a type of porch. Robert Mugerauer, “Toward an Architectural Vocabulary: The Porch as a Between,” in Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, ed. David Seamon (State University of New York Press, 1993), 111.

64. 64 Ron Williams, Landscape Architecture in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 136–7.

65. 65 Martin Benson noted that the trees were maples in his 1895 report. Martin Benson, “Report on the Mohawk Institute and Six Nations Board Schools,” 1895, n.p., File 7825-1A, C-11133, Vol. 2006, RG 10, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC).

66. 66 Williams, Landscape Architecture in Canada, 136.

67. 67 “NEC Report”; “3 August 1859 NEC Report: Nelles,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 53–4.

68. 68 “12 July 1860 NEC Report: O’Meara,” in Graham, 54.

69. 69 No further details on this addition are provided. “NEC Report,” in Graham, 56. See also Province of Canada, The Indian Affairs, Province of Canada Report for the Half-Year Ended 30th June, 1864 (Printed by Hunter, Rose & Co., St. Ursule Street, 1865), 27.

70. 70 “Autumn 1868 NEC Report: Lister”; the recommendation is in “25 February 1869 NEC Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 56–7.

71. 71 “23 November 1869 NEC Report,” in Graham, 58.

72. 72 “December 1870 NEC Report: Botsford”; “2 March 1872 NEC Report: Blomfield”; “6 April 1872 NEC Report: Nelles,” in Graham, 59, 62, 64.

73. 73 “The accommodation in point of lodging is not sufficient. The ventilation and heating are defective, and require improvement according to modern approved plans. A commodious room, which will fully serve all the purposes of an [sic] hospital for the sick, is much needed. They have separate beds. . . . A new school-room, built, arranged, and furnished on some good modern plan is much needed. . . . The rooms . . . now occupied for school purposes would be then available for sleeping accommodation.” “16 May 1872 NEC Report: Nelles, Elliot, Chance, Roberts,” in Graham, 65–6.

74. 74 “NEC Report: Martland notes of verbal statement,” in Graham, 68–9.

75. 75 “NEC Report: Martland notes of verbal statement,” in Graham, 69.

76. 76 “20 November 1872 R. Ashton to NEC,” in Graham, 71.

77. 77 “20 November 1872 R. Ashton to NEC,” in Graham, 71.

78. 78 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 17.

79. 79 “1877 NEC Report: R. Ashton”; “30 July 1877 Gilkison,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 78.

80. 80 Fear-Segal, “Carlisle Campus,” 185.

81. 81 Fear-Segal, 185.

82. 82 See Christopher T. Green, “A Stage Set for Assimilation: The Model Indian School at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Winterthur Portfolio 51, nos. 2–3 (2017): 95–133, https://doi.org/10.1086/694225.

83. 83 See Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Aldine Pub. Co., 1962), 104–5; Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton University Press, 1994), 123–54.

84. 84 “29 September 1879 Gilkison,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 82. J. T. Gilkison reported in both 1877 and 1879 that an addition had been built, although it is not clear whether he was referring to the same addition in each instance. See also “30 July 1877 Gilkison,” in Graham, 78.

85. 85 “1878 NEC Report: R. Ashton,” in Graham, 78.

86. 86 “NEC Report: Six Years Summary,” in Graham, 75.

87. 87 On gender and gender segregation in residential schools, see J. R. Miller, “‘The Misfortune of Being a Woman’: Gender,” in Shingwauk’s Vision, 218–50; John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986, anniv. ed. (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), 238; de Leeuw, “Intimate Colonialisms,” 345, 349–52.

88. 88 Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 193.

89. 89 Miller, 193–4.

90. 90 On the Gothic mode as “a statement of political and cultural allegiance to Britain,” particularly in relation to Canada’s first Parliament Buildings, see Wright, Crown Assets, 109. On the rejection of classicism due to its associations with American republicanism, see Ryan Ferko, “The Value of Regionalism in Assessing Canadian Architectural Heritage: An Examination of the Historical Context of Maritime Collegiate Classicism,” Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 36, no. 2 (2011): 61.

91. 91 The Ecclesiological Society published a widely read journal and influenced the design of churches for other denominations as well as buildings of all kinds. See Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:279–80; Leslie Maitland, Jacqueline Hucker, and Shannon Ricketts, A Guide to Canadian Architectural Styles (Broadview Press, 1992), 51–2; Barry Magrill, “‘Development’ and Ecclesiology in the Outposts of the British Empire: William Hay’s Gothic Solutions For Church Building in Tropical Climates (1840–1890),” Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 29, no. 1 (2004): 15–26.

92. 92 See G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–70 (Yale University Press, 2013); Alex Bremner, “Colonial Architecture and its Global Contexts,” Architecture Australia 104, no. 4 (July–August 2015): 53–6.

93. 93 See Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:264, 269, 276.

94. 94 Kalman, 1:277.

95. 95 “29 September 1886 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 85.

96. 96 “11 September 1891 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, 87.

97. 97 “11 September 1891 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, 87.

98. 98 Cupolas were used on other residential schools remodelled in a similar period. See, for example, the Birtle residential school renovated around 1909. Magdalena Milosz, “‘Don’t Let Fear Take Over’: The Space and Memory of Indian Residential Schools” (master’s thesis, University of Waterloo, 2015), 92–3.

99. 99 “Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School IAP School Narrative,” National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, 31 May 2013, 8, https://archives.nctr.ca/NAR-NCTR-080.

100. 100 “14 September 1893 R. Ashton Annual Report”; “6 September 1894 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 89.

101. 101 “1894 Benson,” in Graham, 91.

102. 102 “1894 Benson,” in Graham, 92.

103. 103 “December 1879 NEC Report: Botsford,” in Graham, 60.

104. 104 “1894 Benson,” in Graham, 90.

105. 105 “11 September 1891 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, 88.

106. 106 “20 September 1892 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, 88.

107. 107 Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Nii Ndahlohke: Boys’ and Girls’ Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915 (Friesen Press, 2022), 17.

108. 108 Alexandra Giancarlo, “Indigenous Student Labour and Settler Colonialism at Brandon Residential School,” Canadian Geographer 64, no. 3 (2020): 466–7.

109. 109 “December 1870 NEC Report: Botsford”; “NEC Report: Six Years Summary,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 60, 75.

110. 110 “NEC Report: Six Years Summary,” in Graham, 79.

111. 111 “1894 Benson,” in Graham, 91.

112. 112 “1894 Benson,” in Graham, 90.

113. 113 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended June 30, 1903 (S. E. Dawson, 1904), 327.

114. 114 “11 September 1891 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 87.

115. 115 “1894 Benson,” in Graham, 90.

116. 116 Benson, “Report on the Mohawk Institute and Six Nations Board Schools,” n.p.

117. 117 On arson as a form of resistance at residential schools, including the Mohawk Institute, see Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 368–70. See also de Leeuw, “Intimate Colonialisms,” 353.

118. 118 “Blaze at Brantford: The Mohawk Institute Totally Destroyed,” The Globe, 20 April 1903, 9.

119. 119 “25 April 1906 Cameron to McLean,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 104. On the carceral history of the Mimico Industrial School, currently the site of the Toronto South Detention Centre, see Magdalena Miłosz, “Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre,” Scapegoat 7 (2014): 47–67.

120. 120 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30 June 1905 (S. E. Dawson, 1906), 282.

121. 121 Maitland et al., A Guide to Canadian Architectural Styles, 111.

122. 122 See G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, 1885–1920 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022).

123. 123 This type of composition was common in residential school photography. See de Leeuw, “Intimate Colonialisms,” 345.

124. 124 Sherry Farrell Racette, “Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography,” in Depicting Canada’s Children, ed. Loren Lerner (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 49.

125. 125 De Leeuw, “Intimate Colonialisms,” 345.

126. 126 On photography and oral history in research on residential schools, see also J. R. Miller, “Reading Photographs, Reading Voices: Documenting the History of Native Residential Schools,” in Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations: Selected Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2004), 82–103.

127. 127 “Lorna’s Sister with Lorna, 1940–1945,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 379. For a further discussion of the size of institutional architecture in children’s experiences, see de Leeuw, “Intimate Colonialisms,” 343.

128. 128 Marie Hess, Going Back Home (BookLand Press, 2019), 55.

129. 129 “10 August 1905 R. Ashton Annual Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 103.

130. 130 “Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School IAP School Narrative,” 9–10.

131. 131 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 18. In 1903, Ernest Charles Ashton was a major in the Dufferin Rifles, which he had joined in 1893. He went on to have an illustrious military career, becoming head of the Canadian Army in 1935. Reverend Ashton’s other son, Alfred Nelles Ashton, became principal of the Mohawk Institute upon his father’s retirement in 1911 but resigned to enlist in the military in 1914. He was known as a particularly cruel administrator. See chapters 1, 8, 11, and 12 for more information about the Ashtons.

132. 132 A closer comparison between the Mohawk Institute and the Middlesex Industrial School may reveal a more detailed architectural genealogy. On industrial schools in the United Kingdom, including Middlesex, see John A. Stack, “Reformatory and Industrial Schools and the Decline of Child Imprisonment in Mid‐Victorian England and Wales,” History of Education 23, no. 1 (1994), 59–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760940230104; Peter Higginbotham, Children’s Homes: A History of Institutional Care for Britain’s Young (Pen & Sword History, 2017).

133. 133 “The Mohawk Institute: New Plans Are Being Drawn Up,” Brantford Weekly Expositor, 9 July 1903; Robert G. Hill, “Stewart, William,” Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800–1950, 2022, http://www.dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/1332. Lewis H. Taylor acted as the local representative for the firm, which was headed by father and son William and Walter Stewart in Hamilton.

134. 134 Hill, “Stewart, William.” The firm’s other projects included a private residence on Brant Avenue in 1902 and an office and factory for Buck Stove Works on Elgin Street in 1903. The Carnegie Building, as the library is now known, is part of Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus. Although Stewart, Stewart & Taylor dissolved in 1904 upon the elder Stewart’s retirement, Walter Stewart and Lewis H. Taylor continued to practise together and separately in a succession of firms, with projects located primarily in southwestern Ontario.

135. 135 Lewis H. Taylor, as part of a firm he formed with his nephew, J. Albert Taylor, also worked on two churches the New England Company intended to build “on the Indian reserve,” presumably Six Nations of the Grand River, in 1907. Further research is needed to ascertain the fate of these projects and what relationship they may have had with the Mohawk Institute. “Contracts Open,” Canadian Contract Record 18, no. 11 (15 May 1907): 6; Robert G. Hill, “Taylor, Lewis H.,” Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800–1950, 2022, http://www.dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/1351.

136. 136 Carnegie libraries were philanthropically funded institutions that were built in towns and cities across North America. Over sixteen hundred libraries resulted from Andrew Carnegie’s building program. On the relationship between classicism and the design of Carnegie libraries, see Abigail A. van Slyck, “‘The Utmost Amount of Effectiv [sic] Accommodation’: Andrew Carnegie and the Reform of the American Library,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, no. 4 (1991): 372.

137. 137 On the consolidation of industrial and boarding schools, see Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 148; Milloy, A National Crime, 71. The contract between government and churches can be found in Correspondence and Agreement Relating to the Maintenance and Management of Indian Boarding Schools (Government Printing Bureau, 1911).

138. 138 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended March 31, 1911 (C. H. Parmelee, 1911), 314.

139. 139 The former Portage La Prairie Indian Residential School now belongs to Long Plain First Nation and is home to the National Indigenous Residential School Museum of Canada. It is a National Historic Site. The residential school in Chapleau was demolished soon after it was sold in the late 1950s. See also Robert G. Hill, “Chene, Jean Dosithe,” Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800–1950, 2022, http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/912; Robert G. Hill, “Orr, Roland Guerney,” Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800–1950, 2022, http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/123.

140. 140 For a list of Orr’s residential school projects, see Milosz, “‘Don’t Let Fear Take Over,’” 12–13.

141. 141 “3 December 1913 Scott to Roche,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 109.

142. 142 Although a rear wing with a different configuration appears to be visible in a photograph of the building from 1917, it is not mentioned in NEC reports, nor is a demolition. See LAC, John Boyd fonds, accession number 1971-120 NPC, “Mohawk Institute Farm in Brantford, [Ont.],” 14 November 1917, photograph by John Boyd, copy negative PA-071299. Scott himself, as deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, signed the drawings for the 1922 project, suggesting his involvement in the design process and the importance of architecture in the department’s activities.

143. 143 Scott, “The Mohawk Institute,” 19.

144. 144 “Jennie Blackbird, 1942–1946,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 389.

145. 145 “I was there when they renovated the buildings, and put up the new barn.” “Harrison Burning, 1920–1928?,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 357. The barn was also likely designed by Orr, as numerous drawings of barns for other residential schools are credited to him in the Indian Affairs archive. See LAC, Finding Aid for RG22M 912016, pages 1–83, a copy of which is in the author’s possession.

146. 146 “31 December 1922 Rogers Quarterly Report”; “31 March 1923 Rogers Quarterly Report,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 138, 139. In 1924, Orr wrote to Rogers to let him know there were no funds to complete the requested work of painting and sheathing the boys’ and girls’ playrooms. R. Guerney Orr to S. Rogers, 3 April 1924, File 466-5, Pt. 2, Vol. 6201, RG 10, LAC.

147. 147 “Martha Hill, 1912–1918,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 355. Hill’s observation about girls and boys being “mixed together” at church is interesting as it contrasts with an earlier phase in the Mohawk Chapel’s history, when its interior was “divided into open seats, one side for the men, the other for the women.” See Beaven, Recreations, 51.

148. 148 “Vera Styres, 1942–1943, 1946–1947,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 391.

149. 149 “Jennie Blackbird, 1942–1946,” in Graham, 389.

150. 150 “Marguerite Beaver, 1940–1948,” in Graham, 385.

151. 151 “23 December 1907 Ramsden to McLean,” in Graham, 105.

152. 152 “Martha Hill, 1912–1918,” in Graham, 356.

153. 153 “Lorna’s Sister with Lorna, 1940–1945,” in Graham, 380.

154. 154 “Jennie Blackbird, 1942–1946,” in Graham, 389.

155. 155 “Jennie Blackbird, 1942–1946,” in Graham, 389.

156. 156 “Sylvia Soney, 1943–1947,” in Graham, 392.

157. 157 “Sylvia Soney, 1943–1947,” in Graham, 392.

158. 158 Racette, “Haunted,” 65.

159. 159 Groat refers to it as the third floor, but I write “second floor” for the sake of consistency with descriptions in other parts of this chapter. Some architectural plans refer to it as the first floor. To clarify, the principal’s apartment was in the central block above the ground floor. “Edward S. (a.k.a. Russell) Groat and Marjorie J. Groat (nee Smith), Ruth Jamieson Seneca, 1930–1939 and 1928–193?, 193?,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 363.

160. 160 Description based on Chas H. Buck, architect, “Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario, Plan No. 876, Sheet No. E - 3, Ground & First Floor Plans,” scale ⅛” = 1 – 0”, July 1948, item number 2407, RG 22M 912016, LAC.

161. 161 “Edward S. (a.k.a. Russell) Groat and Marjorie J. Groat (nee Smith), Ruth Jamieson Seneca, 1930–1939 and 1928–193?, 193?,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 363.

162. 162 “Sylvia Soney, 1943–1947,” in Graham, 393.

163. 163 “Peter Smith, 1926–1935,” in Graham, 361.

164. 164 See “Russ Moses Residential School Memoir” in the opening material of Behind the Bricks.

165. 165 “Sylvia Soney, 1943–1947,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 393.

166. 166 “Peter Smith, 1926–1935,” in Graham, 361.

167. 167 “Peter Smith, 1926–1935,” in Graham, 361.

168. 168 “Sylvia Soney, 1943–1947,” in Graham, 392.

169. 169 The special joint committee of the Senate and the House of Commons made these recommendations as part of its review of the Indian Act between 1946 and 1948. This review led to the 1951 Indian Act amendments, the first to be made with First Nations’ consultation. Canada, Department of Mines and Resources, Report of the Indian Affairs Branch for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1949 (Edmond Cloutier, 1950), 199. See also Zach Parrott, “Indian Act,” in Canadian Encyclopedia, 16 December 2020, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indian-act. On modernist residential schools, see Magdalena Milosz, “Settler-Colonial Modern,” Canadian Architect (September 2021): 12–14, https://www.canadianarchitect.com/settler-colonial-modern/.

170. 170 “Mission Work to be Pushed,” Windsor Daily Star, 13 May 1947, 17.

171. 171 “Indian School Investigated: Pupils at Brantford Lack Clothing, Facilities,” Windsor Daily Star, 23 February 1946, 9.

172. 172 V. G. Kosnar, “Report on Electrical Installation, Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario,” n.d., File 466-5, Pt. 5, Vol. 6201, RG 10, LAC.

173. 173 Chas H. Buck, architect, “Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario, Plan No. 876, Sheet No. E – 1 to E – 4,” various scales, July 1948, item numbers 2405–08, RG 22M 912016, LAC.

174. 174 C. A. F. Clark to Colonel Neary, 24 September 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 1, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

175. 175 C. A. F. Clark to Colonel Neary.

176. 176 C. A. F. Clark to Colonel Neary.

177. 177 Examples include the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, which was opened in 1946 on the site of a former American army base and served Indigenous patients. Temporary wartime housing was also repurposed in some First Nations following the war. See Magdalena Miłosz, “Simulated Domesticities: Settings for Colonial Assimilation in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada,” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 45, no. 2 (2020): 84–5, https://doi.org/10.7202/1073940ar.

178. 178 “Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School IAP School Narrative,” 10.

179. 179 C. A. F. Clark to Colonel Neary, 24 September 1948, n.p.

180. 180 “Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School IAP School Narrative,” 10. For a site plan showing the location of this structure, see “Department of Public Works of Canada, Fire Prevention Branch, Ottawa, Mohawk Institute, Indian Residential School, Brantford, Ontario, Drawing No. 60-1-C,” scale 1 inch = 50 feet, January 1960, File 479/6-1-001, Pt. 9, Vol. 8253, RG 10, LAC.

181. 181 A. J. Doucet to Colonel Neary, 23 November 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 5, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

182. 182 See Chas H. Buck, architect, “Alterations to Attic Floor, Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario, Plan No. 876-A, Sheet No. 1, Plan & Details,” scale as noted (various), November 1949, item number 2409, RG 22M 912016, LAC.

183. 183 Canada, Department of Citizenship and Immigration: Report of Indian Affairs Branch for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1953 (Edmond Cloutier, 1953), 70. According to Rick Hill, local oral history also relates that the principal, the Reverend Canon William John Zimmerman, was moved into the new house to remove him from the principal’s residence in the main building, which was connected to the girls’ dorms and “where he was known to wander in the night from time to time.” For the new staff bedrooms built in the former principal’s space, see “Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario, Alterations to Main Bldg., Sheet No. 2,” scale as noted, May 1952, reproduction number NMC180196, item 2415, RG 22M 912016, LAC.

184. 184 “Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario, Alterations to Main Bldg., Sheet No. 2,” scale as noted, May 1952, reproduction number NMC180196.

185. 185 On the so-called “Indian parlour” in residential schools, see Carr, “‘House of No Spirit,’” 99–105.

186. 186 See, for example, Matthew Barager, “‘No Indians Allowed’: Challenging Aboriginal Segregation in Northern British Columbia, 1945–1965” (master’s thesis, University of Northern British Columbia, 2016), 37, 69–72; Peter Millman, “African Nova Scotian Youth Experience on the Island, the Hill, and the Marsh: A Study of Truro, Nova Scotia in the 1950s and 1960s” (master’s thesis, University of Lethbridge, 2017), 64–71.

187. 187 C. G. Brown, G. J. Buck, and B. O. Filteau, Survey of the Educational Facilities and Requirements of the Indians in Canada, 2 vols. (Department of Citizenship and Immigration, Indian Affairs Branch, 1956), https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.839390/publication.html.

188. 188 Canada, Department of Citizenship and Immigration: Report of the Indian Affairs Branch for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1959 (Queen’s Printer and Controller of Stationery, 1960), 82.

189. 189 Canada, Report of Indian Affairs Branch for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1961 (Roger Duhamel, 1962), 90.

190. 190 Photograph caption, “The Mohawk Institute Boasts An Efficient Modern Kitchen,” Brantford Expositor, 20 January 1961, 13. See also “[Canon W. J. Zimmerman, principal of the Mohawk Institute, examines the new kitchen facilities],” 21 January 1961, Ottawa, photograph by Brantford Expositor, copy negative PA-185878, item number 3638, accession number 1976-281 NPC, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development fonds, LAC.

191. 191 See “Kenneth George, 1953–1960” and “Bill Monture and Kelly Curley, 1963–1969 and 1969,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 411, 426.

192. 192 The photographs are part of the collection “Mohawk Institute Student Photos, 1965” in the larger archive of the Mohawk Institute Histories project initiated and coordinated by Rick Hill.

193. 193 “Bill Monture and Kelly Curley, 1963–1969 and 1969,” in Graham, The Mush Hole, 426.

194. 194 “Government Takes Over Schools,” CBC Television News, 1 May 1969, CBC Digital Archives, video, 3:32, http://www.cbc.ca/player/Digital%2BArchives/Society/Education/Residential%2BSchools/ID/1423591585/.

195. 195 Milloy, A National Crime, 204.

196. 196 G. D. Cromb, Memorandum to File, 6 March1970, INAC File 479/1-1, in Milloy, 205.

197. 197 Hirini Matunga, “A Discourse on the Nature of Indigenous Architecture,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture, ed. Elizabeth Grant et al. (Springer, 2018), 320.

198. 198 For a discussion of the relationship between the identity of the cultural centre and the history of its site as a residential school, see Christina Cecelia Hovey, “Planning for the Memorialisation of the Indian Residential School System: A Case Study of the Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, Ontario” (master’s thesis, Queen’s University, 2012), 90, http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7462.

199. 199 The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience defines a site of conscience as “a place of memory—such as a historic site, place-based museum or memorial—that prevents this erasure [of the past] from happening in order to foster more just and humane societies today.” See “About Us,” International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, accessed 9 November 2022, https://www.sitesofconscience.org/about-us/about-us/.