'All I ever wanted to do was go home'

Indigenous survivors recount past horrors at Canada residential school, writes Ben Simon

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Roberta Hill, one of the thousands of indigenous people who survived Canada’s notorious Mohawk Institute residential school, said she was first sexually abused by an Anglican minister after bidding her visiting mother goodbye.

“Twas so upset, so distraught, and I was crying,” Ms Hill, now 74, said.

“I was taken into a room with the minister, and that’s where the sexual abuse began... You're a little child. You don’t know what the hell is going on?” the retired nurse said.

Ms Hill was back at the Mohawk Institute in the town of Brantford on Tuesday, the day it opened to the public as a museum documenting the horrors committed at the Ontario province school, which operated for roughly 140 years before its closure in 1970.

She was first brought to the school in 1957, along with five of her siblings, after their father died, and spent four years there before being sent into foster care.