The Education of Augie Merasty
A Residential School Memoir
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Heartbreaking and important… brings into dramatic focus why we need reconciliation." - James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains
This memoir offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school.
Now a retired fisherman and trapper, the author was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subject to a policy of "aggressive assimilation."
As Augie Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt o mold children in the ways of white society. They were taught to be ashamed of their native heritage and, as he experienced, often suffered physical and sexual abuse.
But even as he looks back on this painful part of his childhood, Merasty's sense of humour and warm voice shine through.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than 70 years ago, Merasty was sent to St. Therese Residential School in Sturgeon Landing, on the border of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It was one of the 130 church-run schools that all aboriginal children were required to attend as a part of a Canadian government policy of forced assimilation in the 20th century. Between 1935 and 1944, Merasty was physically and sexually abused, beaten, insulted, and exposed to unspeakable conditions by priests and nuns who were supposed to educate him. He carried the scars on his mind and body all his life. Unlike many of his peers who suffered similar or worse abuse silently, Merasty remained courageously determined to publish a book that would expose the injustices he and so many other children endured. In Carpenter (The Literary History of Saskatchewan), he found a superb writer and editor and a tenacious ally who saw the book through to publication even after Merasty's enthusiasm for the project was dimmed first by alcoholism and later by cancer. This book offers a glimpse into Merasty's life in the residential school, exposing a terrible regime where evil went entirely unchecked. A quick read, it's nevertheless a historically significant one.
