Freddy Taylor says serving time at the now-former Guelph Correctional Centre started out as a very dark period in his life, but ended with a renewed passion for life and art.

Taylor, 78, was taken from his home in Curve Lake as a child and forced to go to the Mohawk Residential School in Brantford, Ont. After leaving school, he said, he turned to alcohol and then got involved in criminal activity.

Taylor said he doesn’t recall dates well, but he can confirm he was in jail from the mid-1970s to sometime in the 1980s. During that time, he helped form Native Sons, a group of Indigenous men who helped him and others at the centre to work through trauma in their lives.

“We were happy because [in] the Native Sons group, we talked about everything — alcohol, drugs, how we felt being locked up and being taken away to residential schools. Everything,” Taylor said.

He said many men would create artwork and the group was given permission to paint three murals in the room they used for meetings in a building called the lower assembly hall.

“We planned about what we should put on there and the Guelph reformatory person that was looking after that let us do that after almost a year. And we fought for it,” Taylor said in a phone interview from the Whetung Ojibwa Centre in Curve Lake, north of Peterborough, where he continues to work on his art.

“We took our pain and anger out, and put it on the wall.”

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CBC News
September 30, 2023