‘We had nobody in there to protect us’ says Hill during Indigenous Film Fest – Petrolia Lambton Independent
April 27, 2026
“I still have a hurt child in me,” said Roberta Hill, a survivor of the Mohawk Institute, a residential school in Brantford.
“You will never change that but I have learned as an adult that I have a voice and I am going to use my voice.”
Hill was speaking at a question and answer session Sunday at the Kineto Theatre in Forest, where the Lambton Shores Indigenous Film Festival was being held. The screening of Nature of Healing was presented which reflected the perspectives of survivors who attended the Mohawk Institute as children.
The Brantford school stood for 130 years, closing in the 1970s. The documentary tells of physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of the school’s staff. Children were taken from their home, some as young as five years of age, to live at the school.
