Who can use it ?

P.O.H. will find its home wherever interested and motivated people come together to learn, worship, or work together. Schools are invited (staff and students), worship groups can participate, youth groups and activist groups are encouraged to partner with us.

What does it address?

It addresses the historical amnesia that has afflicted our Euro-Canadian collective memory. It was in 1920 that Dr. Peter Bryce, a federal inspector, brought the deplorable death rates in the IRS system to the attention of Canadians in “The Story of a National Crime”.

Despite the passage of nearly 90 years since Bryce’s ‘whistleblowing’, the public’s awareness of the failure of residential schools is extremely limited, and is centered primarily on the psychological, physical, and sexual abuse of the students, not on the number of deaths resulting from the residential school experience.

But whether deaths were from suicides, tuberculosis, accidents arising from using children as forced labour, or from nutritional deficiencies like rickets, pelegra, etc., the numbers were in the thousands.

Who and what is it meant for?

The finished project is meant to be a gift to Indigenous communities and organizations to use in whatever way they see fit. It is hoped that P.O.H. will impact on the hearts and minds of those who know little about the devastating effect of the residential school experience on generations of people and will “move” us from knowledge, to action.