Basil johnston biography

This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury.

“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. Johnston creates marvelous portraits of the young Indian boys who struggled to adapt to strange ways and unthinking, unfeeling discipline. Even the Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humor occasionally broke through their stern demeanor, are portrayed with an understanding born of hindsight.

Canadian writer

Basil H. JohnstonOOnt (13 July 1929 – 8 September 2015) was an Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) and Canadian writer, storyteller, language teacher and scholar.

Biography

Johnston was born July 13, 1929, on the Parry Island Indian Reserve to Rufus and Mary (née Lafrenière) Johnston.^[1][2] He was a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, formerly Cape Croker (Neyaashiinigmiing), in the Bruce Peninsula.^[3][4][5]

Johnston was educated in reserve schools in Cape Croker and later sent, along with his sister Marilyn, to residential school in Spanish, Ontario. He wrote about his experience as a student at St. Peter Claver School for Boys in his 1988 book Indian School Days.^[3] After graduating high school as class valedictorian, he earned his B.A. with Honours from Loyola College (1954) and a high school teaching certificate from the Ontario College of Education (1962).^[6] In 1959, Johnston married Lucie Desroches, with whom he had three children – Miriam, Tibb

•