Residential-school novella a brief, beguiling account

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2024 (346 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From 1911 to 1915, Enos Montour attended Mount Elgin Industrial School in southern Ontario, the oldest residential school in Canada. Brown Tom’s Schooldays, originally published in 1985, is the only known account of a student’s life at Mount Elgin in that era. Thus the University of Manitoba Press has chosen to reprint it as part of its First Voices, First Texts series.

After all we’ve come to know of the damage caused by residential schools, the mild tone of this fictionalized account comes as a shock. Yes, the students refer to the school as “the Jail” or “the Mush Hole” because they hate eating porridge, and Tom remembers being very homesick when he arrived at the age of 11. But the novel opens with a blissful scene of two boys floating down a river in a rowboat while they cram for final exams.

“You know,” Brown Tom confesses, “I kinda hate to leave this old place. It’s been rough but kind underneath. I think they meant well by us, don’t you?”

In all 15 short chapters of Brown Tom’s Schooldays the school’s staff is depicted as benign. Yes, the students are hungry all the time and they escape to town to buy a loaf and lard whenever they have a few pennies, but that’s because they are growing boys, Montour explains. And most of them are in good health despite their constant hunger; skin infections are common but bearable, and only occasionally does a student develop tuberculosis and disappear.

In her introduction, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum tells us that in the school’s records “there are many complaints lodged by parents and band councils about… poor nutrition, contagious disease, and overwork, as well as inadequate medical care.” Yet Montour tends to portray that time of his life as idyllic.

Thus, the pressing question is the accuracy of Montour’s account. McCallum assures us Montour did attend the school for four years, beginning when he was 11, and that several events portrayed in the novel, including a huge fire, did happen during his time there.

From McCallum’s introduction we also learn that after graduating from Mount Elgin, Montour returned to his Six Nations of the Grand River reserve for a few years before becoming a United Church minister and serving for over 30 years in rural Saskatchewan. We learn he published many articles as well as two books before Brown Tom’s Schooldays.

Could Montour be looking back, many years later, with nostalgia? Mount Elgin is located in a lush area where apple and walnut trees blossom, a beautiful river rushes by and winters are relatively short.

At the same time, his insight into the purpose of the school is clear: “What were they trying to do anyway? Trying to make Whitemen out of Indians.” As to the students’ lives ahead, he predicts that those who choose to live in “the great Anglo-Saxon world of competition and continuous struggle” will face “an inferiority complex on one hand, and real narrow racial prejudice on the other.”

Yet Brown Tom (alias Enos Montour) chooses to continue his education in that world. “Let me tell you my ambition,” he tells his friends. “I am staying with the books. Books have made me what I am… I want to get my matriculation and ‘follow knowledge like a shining star.’”

Perhaps, like Tomson Highway, who discovered his passion for music while attending a residential school in northern Manitoba, Enos Montour is also determined to look at the bright side, attributing his love of books and learning to his time at Mount Elgin.

Faith Johnston is still discovering that truth is seldom simple.