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...