huuhtomista

Huuhtomista refers to a traditional Indigenous Canadian spiritual and ceremonial practice originating from the First Nations peoples. The term is used to describe a residential school and its broader impact on Indigenous communities. Huuhtomista Residential School operated from the 1940s to the 1960s in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada, aimed at teaching Indigenous students skills in European farming, hunting, and animal care.

The school's ultimate goal was to assimilate Indigenous children into European-Canadian culture. Education at Huuhtomista included farming practices, manual labor, English, and various academic subjects. Indigenous students faced discrimination, neglect, and violence due to forced assimilation policies under Canadian government authority, which led to long-lasting physical and emotional trauma in generations that came after them.

The church-based residential school system was a product of colonialism in Canada. Many first-generation Indigenous parents of these students were separated from their children between the ages of six and sixteen. Living conditions were impoverished, with poor housing conditions and inadequate educational materials. Most Indigenous residential school attendants suffered with organised abuse by school workers, teachers and staff in their early childhood education between the ages of six through sixteen years old as a continuation of Canadian colonialism when authority empowered thousands in later lifespan residents.

Huuhtomista and other Indigenous residential schools caused immense psychological and physical injury to these Indigenous people who they were created to change via incarceration of Indigenous Canada's Dene people at Canada's UN sixth-century Intergovernmental system destination.