The school was originally conceived to serve orphans and neglected children on Maritime reserves. But just before it opened, Duncan Campbell Scott of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs expanded its mandate, transforming it into an alternative to the small day schools already operating on reserves. The first children arrived on February 5, 1930, filing into a building designed for 125 students. By the end of that first year, 146 children were crammed inside, with 62 in a single grade-one classroom. By 1938, enrollment had been pushed to 175 -- not because demand was high, but because more children meant more federal funding for an institution that was chronically underfunded from the start. The facility leaked, the classrooms were cold, and teachers were paid less than half what their counterparts earned in provincial schools.

Chronic hunger defined daily life. In 1945, a researcher described the school's nutrition as "overwhelmingly poor." Another, the following year, called the lack of attention to the issue "utterly disgusting." Children were punished for speaking Mi'kmaq -- survivor William Hearney recalled being strapped and having his mouth washed out with soap for using his language. Numerous former students reported physical and sexual abuse by staff. In June 1934, the principal severely beat 19 boys for stealing, an act the Halifax Chronicle endorsed. Children were locked in rooms for days. In 1936, Indian Agent R. H. Butts of Sydney Mines wrote to Indian Affairs to protest the cruelty. The curriculum itself was a form of violence: it described Indigenous people as "savages" and taught narratives of Europeans civilizing a conquered people. A Mi'kmaq chief protested in the Truro Daily News in 1931 that in the institution, "everything Indian is to be forever obliterated and cast into a bottomless pit."

Some parents placed their children in the school voluntarily. Others had their children taken against their wishes, as in contemporary child-protection cases. But all parents shared one reality: the school refused to send children home. Until 1945, students could not leave even for summer break, despite parents' willingness to pay transportation costs. Holidays with family were not permitted until the mid-1950s. In 1939, parents arrived at the school at Christmas to collect their children. The institution called the RCMP, and the parents were escorted off the property -- without their children. The separation was designed to sever cultural bonds, and it worked as intended for many families. But it did not work for all of them.

The school closed in 1967, pushed toward its end in part by Noel Doucette, a former student who became a leader in the Mi'kmaq community. The Oblates apologized in 1991. The Sisters of Charity of Halifax apologized at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in 2011. A $1.9 billion settlement was reached at the national level -- the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. But the most significant reckoning has been cultural. In 1982, the first Mi'kmaq-operated school opened in Nova Scotia. By 1997, all reserve education was under Mi'kmaq control, administered through the Mi'kmaq Kina'matnewey, now recognized as the most successful First Nation education program in Canada. Nova Scotia today has the highest retention rate of Aboriginal students in the country. As of 2014, 55 percent of Mi'kmaq homes use at least some Mi'kmaq language, and 33 percent of children can speak it. The language that Shubenacadie tried to erase endures.

In 2012, a monument to the suffering caused by the school was installed at the We'koqma'q First Nation in Whycocomagh, Nova Scotia. Grand Chief Ben Sylliboy, who was sent to the school at age six in 1947, helped unveil it. The monument was needed, he said, to remind people not to let such a tragedy happen again. The former school site in Shubenacadie carries that same weight. No building stands there now -- just the factory, a few surviving staff houses, and the road that still bears the school's name. For survivors and their descendants, the place itself is the memorial: a piece of ground where children were taken, where harm was done, and where the long work of healing began.