Indian School Days

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 visits Johnston's family and removes 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. In describing the years that follow, Basil Johnston creates marvelous portraits of the young Indian boys as they struggle to adapt to a harsh and strange environment, and of their Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humor occasionally break through the discipline with which the institution is run.