Mohawk Institute Former Residential School Museum

The Mohawk Institute (MI) was an Indian Residential School from 1828 until its closing in 1970. The residential school system in Canada undermined Indigenous culture, separated children from their families, and were sites of horrific abuses. In 2025, the Mohawk Institute will reopen to the public as an historic site and exhibition centre, focused on telling the truth about what happened here, and to be a place of healing and reconciliation for the tens of thousands of Indigenous children subjected to this program.

Working closely with an Indigenous Curatorial Leadership team, Lord Cultural Resources and WeatherstonBruer Associates were hired to provide exhibition planning and design and to assist in the implementation of the project. Our team conducted multiple consultation sessions with Survivors of the Mohawk Institute, to ensure that their stories were appropriately, and accurately, told. We also developed an Interpretive Plan and Content Matrix that mapped out the stories onto the building, unfolding the history of the building through the perspective of the students who were sent there. WBA developed a Concept Design package including floorplans, concept sketches, renderings, and creating a 3D model of the building from scratch. Currently we are completing exhibit content and design for the building. The experiences throughout the building draw on the voices and stories of the children, and Survivors to reveal what life was like at the Institute and the personal and social impacts it continues to have today. We have also planned several digital interactive exhibits, including audio listening stations where visitors can hear from Survivors in their own words, immersive videos telling key stories throughout the building, and a digital language interactive where visitors can learn key words and phrases in the Indigenous languages that children who attended this school were denied speaking.

In parallel to this, Lord is also developing an Exhibitions Operating Plan, with attendance, operating income and expenditure projections for five years from opening. The first step in this process was to assess existing operations at the Woodland Cultural Centre (WCC), to conduct research to better frame the context in which the Centre currently functions and to investigate examples of leading operational practice from elsewhere. This has provided a lens through which to assess how the proposed new experience at the Mohawk Institute Museum will be integrated into and impact operations, attendance, revenue and expenditure at the Woodland Cultural Centre in the future.