Student Reflection: A Visit to the Woodland Cultural Centre

A few weeks ago, I joined a group of MPACS and MTS students and faculty on a trip to the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford. Prior to this visit, my knowledge of Canadian residential schools and the part that they played in the tragic history of Indigenous cultural erasure and systemic oppression was relatively extensive. However, I was not prepared for the emotional reaction that resulted from visiting the site where so many tragedies occurred. As an MPACS student, I’ve been appreciating learning about the holistic nature of being a peacebuilder; remembering that although we’re in the field academia, as peace practitioners we must first understand our own emotions and positionality, and allow ourselves to feel the humanity of the issues that we’re engaging in.

Walking through the former Mohawk Institute Residential School, I felt a deep energy within each room of the building, as though the walls were holding the pain of all their previous occupants. The replication was set up very effectively, walking visitors through the building, room by room as the children would have experienced it. Listening stations were situated along the walls, where visitors could hear personal testimonies from previous residents. Hearing the gut-wrenching stories of abuse while standing in the rooms where it occurred was a sobering… sickening experience. Connecting the dots of time and location; the realization that this occurred 54km from my childhood home and that the last residential school was closed 4 years after I was born…sunk into my body in a way that no reading had replicated before.

I by no means intend to say that I understood the experiences of the children whose stories I heard. In accordance with the French philosopher, Édouard Glissant’s concept of “the right to opacity,” I acknowledge that I can never understand the experiences that these Hodinöhsö:ni', Anishinaabeg and other Indigenous peoples endured by the hand of the Canadian government. But I humbly appreciate their willingness to share their experiences with the settler Canadian public so that awareness may grow, and with it, cultural and national change.