INDIAN SCHOOL DAYS

This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnstons family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Clavers school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury.Spanish! It was a word synonymous with residential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks, slaps, all rolled into one, Johnston recalls. But despite the aching loneliness, the deprivation, the culture shock and the numbing routine, his story is engaging and compassionate. Johnston creates marvelous portraits of the young Indian boys who struggled to adapt to strange ways and unthinking, unfeeling discipline. Even the Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humor occasionally broke through their stern demeanor, are portrayed with an understanding born of hindsight.Basil Johnston has written several books ranging from folk tales and humorous stories to works on the Ojibwa language. After St. Peter Clavers School, he studied history and English at Loyola Collage, Montreal, and attended teachers college. He is a lecturer in the Ethnology Department of the Royal Ontario Museum.Johnston has created a story that radiates compassion, humor, and hope....[His] story is essentially about the boys refusal to be victimized. Unwittingly they learned the ways of psychic survival in adverse circumstances. In being rebellious, defiant, and insubordinate, they retained a sense of their own Indian identity and self-worth that made survival possible.---American Indian QuarterlyThis is an excellent look at the way assimilationist education really worked. Beautifully written, it manages to capture the subculture of student life that existed below the surface of institutional affairs; the world of the school boys-their wants, desires, and fears that school authorities never knew