At the top of a squat hill overlooking the Shubenacadie River, Dorene Bernard swings her SUV around to face a building clad in blue plastic siding. It’s a nondescript factory for plastic packaging, but the space it occupies is distinct. “[It’s] sitting in the footprint of where the school was,” Dorene says.
Between 1929 and 1967, more than a thousand Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children from around the Maritimes, as well as the Gaspé region in Quebec, were sent to this spot in Nova Scotia: the site of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, the only federal residential school in the region. (The Maritimes includes New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Newfoundland and Labrador had its own residential schools, but these were not part of the federal system and only received an apology from Canada in 2017, nine years after the prime minister apologized to residential school students on behalf of the Government of Canada.)
In 1986, the school was demolished, and the plastics factory built in its place. Still, something of the school remains: in a semi-circle at the bottom of the school’s former driveway, three plaques lay out the history of the Shubenacadie residential school in English and French, as well as two orthographies each of Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey.
Plaques erected on the grounds of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School lay out its history for visitors, as children’s toys, sweetgrass and tobacco rest below them.
From 1828 to 1997, 140 federal residential schools operated across Canada. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its Calls to Action in 2015, recommendation 79 addressed incorporating reconciliation in heritage work — including developing a national plan and strategy for commemorating school sites. Since then, the federal government has designated a handful of former schools as national historic sites; Shubenacadie was one of the first, in 2020. This fall, a commemorative park will open a short distance from the school, culminating the work of memorialization.
For survivors and their descendants, many of whom have worked for years to have sites officially recognized, the designations are a complex phenomenon: former schools remain profoundly painful places and some communities have fought to have schools demolished. But while the history of residential schools is indelible for many survivors, collective memory is slippery, and among survivor groups, a patient effort is underway to preserve something of that past — to ensure Canada doesn’t forget what happened in residential schools, and what it took to survive them.
“We want our descendants, and the ones that are to come to have a place to come learn about who they are … what our ancestors came through, [and] honour that, so that they can take that strength,” Dorene says. “That’s what this work is all about.”
Not all Indigenous people want to see residential schools commemorated. But Dorene Bernard and others who survived Shubenacadie want to ensure their descendants know their history.
Survivors led process for Shubenacadie commemoration
Dorene’s family bookends the school’s existence. Her father started when it opened in 1929; she and her siblings were some of the last to leave. When Dorene recalls the years she spent there, her voice is quiet. She felt abandoned, she says. Her older sister tried to take care of her, but despite those efforts, Dorene witnessed and was subjected to beatings and other forms of physical abuse; in one particularly awful moment, she remembers a nun sitting her on a stack of phone books while a travelling dentist pulled eight of her teeth without medication, resulting in jaw pain that affects her to this day.
After the remaining children left in 1967, the imposing brick building sat empty for nearly 20 years, growing increasingly derelict. In the 1980s, a fire tore through the school, and shortly thereafter, the structure was demolished. In her book Out of the Depths, survivor Isabelle Knockwood recalls survivors gathering for the demolition and cheering as the wrecking ball tore through the walls. “There was no sadness, no tears at seeing the building finally being punished and beaten for having robbed so many Indian children of the natural wonders and simple pleasures of growing up,” she wrote.
Memorials hang on trees on the grounds of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, where survivors gathered in 1986 to cheer as the buildings were torn down.
The demolition, and the visits survivors made to the school in the days leading up to it, marked a beginning for survivors collectively unpacking their experiences. In 1995, a group of Shubenacadie survivors led by Nora Bernard filed the first class-action lawsuit against Canada for compensation to residential school survivors. The suit precipitated a flurry of additional lawsuits that eventually resulted in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007, which compensated tens of thousands of survivors. Another outcome of that agreement was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Years later, when the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, an organization founded to preserve Mi’kmaw history and historic sites, began to work on the recommendations of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, survivors were once again clear what they wanted: –> “[They said] ‘We want to make sure Canada — the world — never forgets what has happened to us at this place. So, we want to see the school designated as a national historic site,’ ” Tim Bernard, executive director of the cultural centre, says.
Tim Bernard, executive director of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, says the survivors of Shubenacadie were clear they wanted the history of the school to be commemorated, so their experiences would never be forgotten.
Tim’s own experience is a testament to the importance of having a record. In 1998, an Elder showed him a photograph of residents obtained from the archive of the Sisters of Charity — the nuns who staffed the school — vowing she was going to track down the name of every child in it. When she came back, she pointed out two boys: Tim’s father and uncle.
Tim had had no idea they had been taken there — his father had passed away, after a struggle with alcoholism, having never discussed his experiences. “For me, it heightens my awareness around trauma, and the impacts of trauma,” he says. It also made work to have the school designated personal, though he emphasizes it’s been led by survivors.
Tim Bernard had no idea his late father John Bernard was a survivor of Shubenacadie until an Elder identified him in this photo.
Guided by those survivors, Tim sent a request in 2019 for a designation to Parks Canada, and in 2020, the federal government declared the former school a national historic site. The plaques were unveiled on Truth and Reconciliation Day a year later. Dorene, who led engagement work for the centre, says survivors had a lot of input into the wording — and insisted that it state that survivors considered residential school policy to be genocide.
Being a national historic site doesn’t come with a lot of resources, Tim says. Still, the designation is a testament to the fact that survivors’ stories are true.
“Other than us putting the plaques up, you would never know that the school was there,” he says. “I think that was [survivors’] intention, to remind people that this is a dark part of our history.”
Survivors were adamant that the words “cultural genocide” be used to describe residential school policy.
Indigenous communities vary in approaches to former school sites
The National Program of Historical Commemoration has existed for more than a century. For much of its existence, its tone was celebratory, but that’s changed in the last several decades, Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, director of history and commemoration for Parks Canada, says.
“Commemoration was seen as something generally positive, something to celebrate. Now it’s a bit different.”
The program is driven almost entirely by public requests and there are two main sets of criteria: sites must have national historic significance and have existed for at least 40 years. The federal government also designated the residential school system an event of national significance in 2019.
Five former residential school sites have been designated as national historic sites since 2020, but survivors and communities vary in their decisions about how to mark the history of the residential school system.
Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, Foisy-Geoffroy says, Parks Canada began collaborating with Indigenous communities to determine what they wanted done with former schools. While some wanted a historic site designation, responses ranged, and others turned down federal commemoration: for some, demolishing buildings has been the more important step towards healing.
So far, five sites have been designated. Parks Canada focused its outreach on larger institutions where the main buildings are still standing, though Shubenacadie was prioritized as the only former site in the Maritimes. “It’s the history that is at the core of it, not [the buildings’] architectural value, of course. But the building is still important,” Foisy-Geoffroy says.”
Since the 1960s, many school buildings have been torn down, though roughly 50 are still standing. and in use — as gymnasiums, staff residencies and other outbuildings, including as schools. Others serve as offices, cultural centres or housing. At one — the former St. Eugene Mission School, on Ktunaxa territory near Cranbrook, B.C. — the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council applied for a national historic site designation in 1996. That application was rejected after the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs intervened, arguing commemoration decisions should be delayed until after the release of the final report by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, according to an essay published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. So instead, the five bands who share the land turned the school into a golf course and resort owned by the Ktunaxa Nation.
Fog covers the grounds of the former Shubenacadie residential school. While none of the original structures remain, a factory stands in the footprint of the former institution.
At other sites, communities have set aside school buildings as testimony to the residential school era, including the Portage La Prairie Residential School in Manitoba, which operated from 1891 to 1975. It’s on the Treaty 1 territory of the reserve lands of Long Plain First Nation, for which Dennis Meeches served as chief for 20 years, starting in 1998.
By the time Meeches entered politics, the federal government had transferred the 45-acre school site to the nation, as part of a treaty land entitlement claim. For a time, the building hosted Yellowquill College, Manitoba’s first Indigenous-owned and operated post-secondary institution. Then, in the early 2000s, a Knowledge Keeper told Meeches the building should be converted to a museum.
“I thought that actually made really good sense, in terms of being able to provide some education and awareness to [not only] Indigenous people … but everybody in general,” he says. “It was a sacred project in my eyes.”
In 2003, Long Plain declared the former school a historic site and began amassing material for the collection of what it named the National Indigenous Residential School Museum. Seventeen years later, the federal government issued its own designation— a step Meeches says was important, given the federal government’s role in the residential school system. Ultimately, he hopes being a national historic site will serve to bolster the vision for the museum.
Watching the plaque unveiling this past August, Meeches thought of what it took for his parents and grandparents to survive the system. Survivors are aging and passing away, he says, even as denial about the reality of residential schools continues to circulate — making it important to preserve a record of that history.
“It’s important to remember where we came from, to learn from the residential school era and to make positive changes in life as our ancestors would have wanted us to do.”
Dennis Meeches, former chief of Long Plain First Nation
Nonetheless, not every community has wanted schools preserved. For years, c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht First Nation) on Vancouver Island has been demolishing the buildings of the former Alberni Indian Residential School. Today, just the gymnasium and the main building, called Caldwell Hall, remain, with demolition of the hall set to happen within a year.
On the grounds of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School is a memorial commemorating residential schools across the country, a striking reminder of the vast reach of a system created to forcibly assimilate generations of Indigenous children.
Elected Chief Councillor Wahmeesh (Ken Watts) says the presence of Caldwell Hall is an open wound in the community. While the nation’s leadership has had discussions with Parks Canada about a designation, they haven’t made a formal decision about how to proceed. “We were a little bit worried about what that actually meant … does that restrict us?” he says. “Even internally we asked ourselves, ‘Why should we let somebody designate something a historic site they were a part of creating in the first place?’ ”
Watts says they haven’t closed the door on a designation eventually, but for now, they’re listening to the community — and the community has been clear they want the buildings gone. “More important than giving some place a designation is actually tearing down and rebuilding new so that our community can heal.”
Other existing schools, like Shingwauk Indian Residential School on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Ontario, accepted a designation but turned down a plaque; survivors opted to use the money to restore an existing monument instead.
Federal funding allocated to supporting national historic site designations ended in March 2025, but Foisy-Geoffroy says Parks Canada is committed to continuing to work with interested communities, with several more designations in the works.
“All this is part of who we are … so it’s a way for us to make sure people — non-Indigenous and Indigenous alike — better understand their own history, and eventually try to build a better future, she says.
Commemoration honours survivors, keeps history alive
When Elmer Lewis started at the Shubenacadie residential school, he was five years old. He was given a number — one — which also put him first in line for punishments like humiliation for wetting the bed. “It’s hard to ever forget anything,” he says. “It’ll always be with me.”
For three years, Elmer stayed at the school year-round. It wasn’t until he was eight that he was allowed to return home for the summer, via the “freedom road” — the school’s driveway, which Elmer still dreams about, decades later.
In 2021, on June 21— the annual date children were allowed to leave for the summer — survivors and their descendants gathered on that driveway and walked the half-kilometre route children once took to the train station that would take them back home.
Survivors like Elmer Lewis called the school driveway the “freedom road,” waiting each year for the day when they’d be released to their families for the summer.
The march now takes place every year. Elmer’s daughter Tara Lewis, from Eskasoni First Nation, started the event to honour her father after he shared a dream about a march on freedom day. Tara grew up visiting the site with her dad, and now takes her own children there. She says it’s important to keep the history of residential schools alive, and seeing survivors and descendants travel the route from the school to the train station made that history real.
“I was so moved, because I could just picture my dad as a little boy. And I could see my dad, you know, 75 years old, walking and marching, not with sadness but with pride because he’s resilient and he’s a survivor,” she says.
This fall, Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre is unveiling a commemorative park and monument to celebrate the resilience of survivors and descendants, close enough to the school to see the former site, but far away enough that people feel safe. Tim says when the centre asked survivors what they wanted out of a commemorative park, they talked about a place that centred not on the school, but on hope and reclamation and how despite “everything that’s happened to us, look at all the good news stories … that we’ve been able to achieve.”
Each year, survivors and descendants of the school walk the half-kilometre “freedom road” together, a way of keeping the history alive.
For Dorene, the park is the culmination of a long journey: first as a survivor, then as someone who’s spent over a decade working on commemoration. “This has been a long process and I think maybe it had to be that way,” she says, watching heavy equipment prepare the park in early September.
She says it’s hard that in the time it’s taken to get the designation and start commemoration projects, so many survivors of the school have passed. There are at most a few hundred left. But the monument will stand as a reminder for future generations of what their ancestors came through.
Back by the school site, Dorene puts down tobacco at a place set aside for ceremonies on the banks of the Shubenacadie River. The day before, she had drummed for a baby-and-me group. Watching children do the things residential school had once taken from her, Dorene says, was like seeing her prayers come to life in front of her. “That’s where we should be,” she says. “That’s the power of our people coming, and I don’t see that going away ever again.”
