Survivors group calls for more federal funding for organizations probing residential schools

Diane Hill was admitted to the Mohawk Institute Residential School in 1963, only ten days after her seventh birthday. 

She told CBC News she remembers her first day at the school clearly. At breakfast, she saw the school's house mother slap another young student who threw up her breakfast. Later, she remembers being held underwater by the house mother while being bathed in a tub. She said she thought she might drown.

"After that, it was absolute fear," Hill, a member of the Turtle Clan of the Mohawk Nation and resident of the Six Nations of the Grand River, said as she attended a rally on Parliament Hill on Monday.

The rally was held to protest the federal government's decision to impose a new cap on funding for organizations investigating missing Indigenous children and unmarked graves.

Hill is a board member with the Survivors' Secretariat, a survivor-led organization established in 2021 to investigate what happened to children admitted to the Mohawk Institute during its operation.

The secretariat is warning that its work is in jeopardy due to decreased funding from Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

The maximum amount of funding provided to an individual organization through the department's Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support program is now capped at $500,000 per year, a reduction from the previously announced $3 million cap.

Dozens of survivors and supporters joined Monday's rally on Parliament Hill to call on the government to boost the available funding.

"As a native woman, I have a responsibility to care for our children and that is what gives me strength – my identity that they tried to take away," said Hill.

The Mohawk Institute, open between 1828 and 1970, was the longest operating residential school in Canada.

Hill was one of approximately 15,000 children believed to have attended the residential school.

"It wasn't just me," she said. "We need the funding because we need to locate them."

The secretariat says it has identified 96 child deaths at the school through records research – a number nearly double the 48 child deaths listed by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

The secretariat's work has personal significance for its lead investigator, Laura Arndt, a member of Six Nations whose mother was a survivor of the Mohawk Institute. Arndt said the $500,000 funding cap is not enough to sustain the organization's work.

"With that, I have no staff. I have no research capacity," she said. "I might as well sit twiddling my thumbs."

Arndt said the secretariat has suspended its work connecting school records with survivors' nations and has paused plans to build a memorial park while waiting for word on funding.

Ryan Tyndall, a Crown-Indigenous Relations spokesperson, said the government's adjustments to the funding program are aimed at allowing it to be distributed to as many community-led initiatives as possible. 

"The government of Canada is committed to addressing the legacy of residential schools," Tyndall wrote in an email. He added that the fund has seen 146 funding agreements approved for a total of $216.6 million since it was established in 2021, and an additional $91 million in new funding was identified in this year's federal budget. 

Arndt said the secretariat isn't prepared to accept the change.

"We can't do the work," she said. "We're already making compromises and now you tell me what I can do with $200,000 for research [and] $300,000 for what they call field work."

Arndt said she expects the impact of the funding cuts to be felt by other survivors' organizations. 

Sherlene Bomberry, who sits on the secretariat's board, said the work survivors' organizations do to retrieve residential school records and identify unrecorded child deaths is vital to connecting up the "missing links" for survivors and their family members.

"My little grandkids won't be able to know," said Bomberry, a member of the Wolf Clan of the Cayuga Nation and member of Six Nations.

In 1966, Bomberry was admitted to the Mohawk Institute along with her sister and two brothers. 

"That was scary because I didn't know where we were going," she said. "As soon as we got up there, my sister and I were put on one side and my two brothers were put on another side, so we were separated." 

It wasn't the first time her family had been split up; Bomberry said she recalls her and her siblings being taken into foster care before they were admitted to residential school, leaving behind a younger brother and sister.

But the environment she encountered at the Mohawk Institute was unlike any she had experienced before, she said.

"We had freedom. We had food on the table. I never got hit until I went to residential school," she said.

Like Bomberry, Ramon Kataquapit understands the desire to search for missing pieces of his personal history. Unable to speak his grandparents' native Cree, he learned of their experiences at St. Anne's Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ont. through stories his mother told.

"I believe it's important for us to be here and stand with [survivors] to fight for this funding cut not to be forwarded …" he said.

"Us Indigenous are very spiritual people and in order for the healing, we need to find those burials, those documents, those children to hold that ceremonial for them to go into the spirit world in a good way."