Vanessa Watts is an associate professor of Indigenous Studies and Sociology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
December 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and its Calls to Action. Other forms of reconciliation are also happening among Indigenous communities that had previously been unconnected but share common experiences of systemic removal at the hands of powerful institutions.
This new reconciliation includes two Indigenous groups that narrowly missed one another at a very specific and dark time in Canadian history now coming back together under new terms – their own.
In southern Ontario, the similar yet distinct experiences of two groups of Indigenous people, both displaced from their homes and families and compelled to live in colonial institutions, played out separately, just 40 kilometres apart: First Nations children sent to the Mohawk Institute and Inuit patients sent to the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium.
Indigenous survivors and organizations have been working for decades towards local and national forms of truth-telling. As a result, these chapters in the centuries-long saga of Indigenous resistance and resurgence continue to be more deeply understood in terms of historical and contemporary realities in Indigenous communities – as well as to the history of Canada.
A team of scholars and organizations, of which I am proud to be a member, is working to pull as much information as possible about these events into the daylight and use it to understand and advance the ongoing recovery from these experiences.
Two colonial institutions
The Mohawk Institute – a residential school remembered as the “Mush Hole” for the poor quality of its food – operated in Brantford, Ont., from 1831 to 1970.
During that time, more than 4,600 schoolchildren, most of them Haudenosaunee people from the Six Nations of the Grand River and nearby communities, were separated from their families and made to live at the school.
There, they were forced to learn English and to provide unpaid labour for the institute’s own operation and for neighbouring farms, all while enduring efforts to assimilate them into colonial society. Many were abused.
The last decades of the Mush Hole overlapped with the period when the nearby Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium, perched above the city’s west end on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, treated more than 1,200 Inuit tuberculosis patients.
Between 1948 and 1963, Inuit were sent south from communities thousands of kilometres away in Nunavut. For a period, the “San,” as it was called, represented the largest year-round settlement of Inuit in all of Canada. Some Inuit patients never saw their families or homes again.
‘Re-neighbouring’ communities
Our multi-year project, called Re-Neighbouring as Reconciliation: Indigenous Stories of Resistance, is now in full swing. It aims to improve access to records and artifacts, to gather and share information with all who are interested and to facilitate progress and healing through research, cultural exchanges and education that will introduce people from Six Nations to their counterparts from Nunavut in a concept we call “re-neighbouring.”
However, our team faces political and logistical challenges in doing this work. Some records from the San, for example, are not yet accessible to surviving patients, their families and their communities. We are advocating to correct that, especially in view of the TRC’s Calls to Action advocating for greater openness from museums and archives.
Even finding a way to connect this history to the present is complicated – is something really an artifact if it has cultural value to a living community?
In collaboration with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, we are working to bring a collection of soapstone carvings created by recovering tuberculosis patients during their long convalescence in Hamilton back to their communities to be seen by the descendants of the people who sculpted them.
Together, we are taking a meaningful look at repatriating what rightfully belongs to these communities, including the records of their experiences and the products of those experiences.
The Cross of Lorraine erected in 1953 along the road leading to the old Hamilton sanitorium. The cross was erected as a reminder of the threat of tuberculosis. (Vanessa Watts)
Healing and justice
The goal is for survivors and those impacted intergenerationally within their communities to get to know one another across these two territories. We want to show how they are interacting with one another through their independent diplomatic and sovereign relations on their own terms.
The best outcome would be for those who were directly impacted to see themselves reflected in a way that gives them a feeling of connection, and for young people whose families and communities were affected by these institutions to know that history and to feel empowered to guide the future of their own lives and their children’s lives.
This work is about more than gathering information and publishing research. Our guiding principles are healing and justice. Our hope is to recover Indigenous knowledge, and to build new connections and understanding among and between the affected communities.
It’s important that everyone should witness distinct Indigenous communities coming together and understand there is not one broad Indigenous entity, but many. All of them are reclaiming their pasts and charting new futures for themselves.
Vanessa Watts is an associate professor of Indigenous Studies and Sociology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.