His Cohort

In the 1950s, the United Church minister and journalist Enos T. Montour began a somewhat fictionalized account of his experience at Mount Elgin Residential School, in Muncey, Ontario. Some twenty years later, as commercial interest in Indigenous literature increased, he started shopping his manuscript around — unsuccessfully. One Toronto publisher, J. M. Dent and Sons, called it “too innocent,” and the United Church’s communication division, which had published Montour’s first book in 1973, didn’t want it without the Canada Council’s backing. Finally, in 1983, Montour wrote his editor, the anthropologist Elizabeth Graham, that there was one thing left to do: “Have it photocopied and be done with it.”

Born on the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, Montour died in November 1984, at eighty-five. Months later, Brown Tom’s Schooldays, xeroxed at a print shop, began circulating on letter-size paper. Graham sent one copy to the National Library of Canada and distributed the rest to the author’s loved ones. In the late 1990s, the historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum saw it referenced in a book and acquired another researcher’s pixelated scan. At that point, no memoirs or biographies by former residential school students focused on Mount Elgin, which opened before Confederation and closed in 1946 (McCallum’s great-grandfather had been one of its students). In 2019, she connected with Montour’s family and the University of Manitoba Press, which agreed to a new edition. To her knowledge, the text remains the sole published life writing on the school.

The story opens in spring 1915, with a “scene of idyllic contentment” on the Muskegan River. Sitting in a rowboat one afternoon, sixteen-year-old Brown Tom and Angus Greenleaf eat cheese and contemplate the impending end of their time at Mount Elgin, its Victorian buildings looming nearby on a plateau. “I’ll kinda hate to leave this old place,” Tom says. “It’s been rough but kind underneath. I think they meant well by us, don’t you?” The following chapters relate the previous five years, beginning when Tom is a fearful, lonely, and hungry “New Boy.”

At eleven, he and his peers leave behind their “boyish activity,” because of either sickness and starvation or common teen milestones, such as a new-found interest in girls or giving up childhood beliefs. Devastated on his first Christmas morning at the school, Tom awakens to his daily breakfast of “Mush ’n’ Milk” and to the bad news, delivered by an older student, that he has grown too old for Saint Nick: “All he longed for just then was his Injun Bush home — where Santa always came.” Weeks later, the vice-principal hands out new but tattered toques and warns the students to “watch out for those candies inside.” Tom misses the sarcasm and experiences a surge of hope, only to reach in and grab a fistful of mothballs.

Throughout the school year, students barter their weekly dessert for extra slabs of lard. They milk cows and suffer from skin diseases. And they are beaten by teachers. The severity of conditions leads to Noah, a student who likes to craft slingshots by the river, becoming listless and dying from tuberculosis. He is “taken away from the Institution quietly, and emptiness remained where the gentle boy had lived with his pals,” Montour writes in a particularly gutting scene.

But upon graduation, Tom recalls only the good memories of his time at school: fishing in the spring, basking on farmland in the early summer, and gathering walnuts in the fall. On a Sunday afternoon, resting beneath a maple tree, he and his classmates consider what’s next. “Our people are in bondage to the White man,” one says. “We who have some education ought to help them.” One student wants to become a nurse, another a farmer. Tom’s friend Angus has a simpler ambition: “to get me one good square meal.” Tom wonders if even the teachers would be asking themselves, “Had this all been a mistake?” Had they rendered the students unfit for “the old Reserve life without being able to promise them very much out in the great big Anglo-Saxon world?”

Like the book’s students, McCallum argues, Brown Tom’s Schooldays was forced to straddle worlds. It did not fit the expectations of many publishers, who searched for “more explicitly blunt and unpolished descriptions of Indigenous trauma.” The title itself — which Montour described as a “play on words with an ethnic twist”— riffs off Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes’s fictionalized account of his adventures at an elite British boarding school. It foreshadows Montour’s light-hearted approach, which contrasts a simple and at times juvenile tone with the horrendous environment depicted. “The brilliance of Brown Tom’s Schooldays lies not only in what Enos teaches us in the stories,” Elizabeth Graham declares in her foreword, “but in the important lesson that you can educate through humour.”

In an afterword, two of Montour’s granddaughters write that while the “British monarchy” took away his culture, he felt loyal to it — to the point that he obtained United Empire Loyalist status. Through Mount Elgin, the Crown gave him a childhood more stable than what his reserve might have offered, and, like his main character, he found his vocation and passion there. As Tom tells his friends that Sunday afternoon, “I am staying with the books. Books have made me what I am.”