Canada residential schools: Will hunt for Indigenous graves bring healing?

For years, Geronimo Henry couldn’t talk about the childhood he spent at the Mohawk Institute Residential School in southern Ontario. But when he found his voice, well into adulthood, he began a search for justice around his experience as an Indigenous child separated from his family in Canada’s vast assimilation experiment.

Today, Mr. Henry, who is in his 80s, gives talks to schools, churches, and community groups in Canada and the United States. He is raising funds to build a memorial wall that lists all the names of the Indigenous children who studied in this red-brick building throughout its 139-year history.

And now, after hundreds of unmarked graves of children were found near residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan in the past six weeks, he is pushing for the grounds where he lived from

“How can you heal if we don’t have all the truth?”“Resolution has to come from within the community”