Beschrijving
ISBN/EAN: 1550130722
Auteur(s): Basil H. Johnston
Genre: Biografie
Uitgave: Hardcover met stofomslag, Engelstalig
Aantal bladzijden: 250
Uitgever: Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto
1e Druk, Jaartal: 1988
Afmetingen: 236 x 160 x 22 mm
Gewicht: 532 g + 130 g (verpakking) = 662 g
Loc: K-01-C-01-13
Indian school days – Basil H. Johnston
Beschrijving:
Indian School Days is the humorous, bittersweet autobiography of Basil Johnston, a native Ojibway, who was taken from his family at age 10 and placed in a “residential” school in northern Ontario. The book opens in 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s School, a boarding school run by Jesuit priests at Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury, Ontario.
“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. He creates marvellous portraits of the young Indian boys who struggled to adapt to strange ways and unthinking, unfeeling discipline. Even the Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humour occasionally broke through their stern demeanour, are portrayed with an understanding born of hindsight.
Indian School Days is a unique portrait of Indian life and a telling commentary on a Canadian government policy that removed native children from their parents—with sad, sometimes even tragic, results.
