As a little girl, Roberta Hill survived four years of physical and sexual abuse in the Mohawk School in Canada, one of 139 residential schools designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. An estimated 6,000 other children did not survive. Ms Hill, a Mohawk (Turtle Clan) elder once known to the nuns as #54, was raped twice by the school's principal, an Anglican priest.
"There were two ministers at the school," Ms Hill recounted. "One liked the little girls and one liked the little boys . . . They were pretty brutalized, the boys, and if they weren't getting beaten, they were being raped." The schools were funded by the government and run by churches, primarily the Catholic Church.
