It was in the visiting room off the foyer that a house mother pulled a pair of scissors from the desk drawer and popped the blue balloon Diane Hill received as a gift from her mother on her seventh birthday.

It was Nov. 23, 1963, her first day at the Mohawk Institute Residential School.

Survivor Diane Hill talks about life at the Mohawk Institute Residential School, where she was taken at age seven. The building is reopening as an historic and interpretive site on Sept. 30 after a $26-million restoration. The Hamilton Spectator

Decades later, Hill stood in the same room, overwhelmed by a feeling of “unity” as other survivors and supporters moved through the newly renovated building where she was once beaten.

“You can feel it when they come in,” she said on Monday, flip-flopping b

See Full Page