It was once a familiar part of Brantford, Ont. — a respectable-looking institution that people would pass by with no suspicion about what was going on inside. Which was, often, cruelty. The new book “Behind the Bricks: The Life and Times of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s Longest-Running Residential School” gathers bleak accounts of life inside those walls for the Indigenous students: loneliness, sexual abuse, violence and more, over decades, ending when the institute closed in 1970. This portion edited by Richard W. Hill Sr. collects former students’ recollections of school discipline, and even abuses between students, under the heading, “On Being Punished.”

“They had one little room — it had just had room to crawl in and go in the bed if you done anything wrong. That’s how he’d punish yo

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