CANADA HAD ITS own tortured history. When I read the published findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, my mind went back to my friend Basil Johnston and all that he managed to teach me during the years that we knew each other.
We first met in 1975 when he was working at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Ethnography Department. He delighted in showing me the rooms where his “finds” were housed. Those days he used to dress quite formally in grey pants and jacket, but as time went on, he started to wear a traditional embroidered vest and an elaborate string-tie pin that looked like a silver wheel. We often went across the street to the Roof Lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel, and Basil would tell me stories about life for the Anishinaabe, bits of history, legends, the sources of the legends. He’d talk about his friends and about his own funny escapades before he was captured by “the system.”
Basil was only ten when he was taken to the residential school in Spanish, Ontario. More like a threat than a place name, Spanish had loomed large in the imaginations of children on reserves. Teachers and sometimes parents would threaten that if kids didn’t behave, they would end up in Spanish. Basil’s little sister, only four years old, was taken along by the dreaded “Indian agent” only because the man needed to complete his form—the one that called for two children from the same family. She was too young to understand what was happening, and Basil was just old enough not to explain.
Located 130 kilometres west of Sudbury and 200 kilometres from Sault Ste. Marie, Spanish was a no-industry town, half emptied by the Great Depression, relying for its subsistence and entertainment on the St. Peter Claver school, where the children put on performances of baseball, hockey, and plays selected by the Jesuit priests.
For Basil and the other boys, aged four to sixteen, “the school” meant “reformatory, penitentiary, hunger, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks and slaps.” It’s the life Basil recounted with both humour and sadness in his childhood memoir, Indian School Days.
The priests, who ran that school and other schools like it in Canada, assumed that “Indian culture was inferior.” One boasted that “not a word of Indian is heard from our boys after six months. This was achieved through strict discipline and rigorous punishment.”
In addition to strict discipline and hard work, the purpose of the school was to foster religious vocation. Yet, as Basil pointed out, the school produced no priests. It was not lost on the boys that while they starved, eating only barley soup with chunks of gristle, the Fathers dined on meat and potatoes.
Basil painted a heart-breaking picture of the youngest crying and whimpering all day and night, wretchedly clinging to each other and to the knees of the indifferent priest who was in charge of them. Basil’s conclusion was that the Jesuits had taken an oath upon entering the order to repudiate all feelings.
The system continued through the 1950s and into the ’60s. The children were “wards of the Crown,” not citizens of their own country. It was not until 1960 that First Nations people were allowed to vote without losing their status.
Though I had some understanding of Indigenous issues from reading Maria Campbell’s Half-Breed, Basil’s Indian School Days was the first I had heard of the horrific fate of children in government-sponsored religious schools in Canada. I didn’t know that children were forcibly removed from their homes, that they were separated from friends and family, and I had no sense of the widespread abuse, the cultural genocide rooted in the Indian Act of 1876. What is just as surprising: few people knew of the “Sixties Scoop,” a federal government policy that removed First Nations children from their homes in the 1960s and placed them in foster homes or put them up for adoption elsewhere. The press did not deem this worth reporting, and Canadians either didn’t know or didn’t care about what was done in their name.
Basil had relearned the Anishinaabe language. He taught me a few words, all of which I have now forgotten. He thought it was quite amusing that I was born in Hungary, a country with no colonizing ambitions. I remember telling him that even had there been world conquerors among us, we were unlikely to have chosen such an inhospitable land as the one inhabited—quite happily—by his own ancestors. He laughed.
I was puzzled when Basil told me about his return to Spanish for a stint of high school when he could have stayed with his family. He was not very good at menial labour, he explained, and that was all the work he could find on the Parry Island Indian Reserve. He excelled at school, went to Loyola College on a scholarship, became a teacher, an avid hockey fan, married, and raised a family.
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AT M&S I had fought for the publication of Basil’s books Ojibway Heritage and Moose Meat and Wild Rice, the latter a series of very funny stories without the pain that pervades Indian School Days. At Key Porter, I didn’t have to fight to publish Basil.
I think his most challenging book was The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway, published in 1995.
It is the first comprehensive collection and explanation of the sacred stories that inspired and informed the life of the Ojibway before that life was subsumed by contact with the white people. In some ways, this is Basil’s vindication of his heritage that the government and the priests had failed to erase.
The last of Basil’s books that we published was Crazy Dave, a beautifully told tale of Basil’s uncle Dave, born with Down syndrome yet always trying to fit in with the people on the Cape Croker reserve, struggling to be one of the guys. In our promotion of the book, reaching for a catch-all metaphor, we held him up as some sort of reflection of the Ojibways’ struggle to fit into a world not eager to accept them on any—least of all their own—terms.
Basil, for me, was the kind of writer who made our entire publishing enterprise worth the effort. His unique voice, his immense knowledge, his patient perseverance have added immeasurably to our knowledge of who we all are.