This is a very short book. It came to me in snippets through the mail over a period of years, a shocking and frequently touching series of accounts from an old Cree trapper about his confinement in a residential school from 1935 to 1944. At age five, Augie was taken to St. Therese school in Sturgeon Landing, and he was released when he was 14. Amid his accounts of torture, sexual assault, brutality and callous disregard are moving accounts of kindness he received from nuns, priests and monks at the school. Because Augie experienced both extremes at St. Therese, he became a discerning judge of good and evil in his small, confined world.
Augie began writing to me in 2001, and for 12 years I was his editor, cheerleader, counsellor, critic and pen-pal. He was always two people to me: a hopeless alcoholic who would disappear for months, even years at a time, abandoning his dark memoir and then re-appearing like a ghost to resume our dialogue; and an intelligent, fair observer of the life around him, an engaging voice, a courageous man who spent a long season in Hell and returned to tell the story. To me, this second version was the real Augie, the man of integrity, who managed to voice the wrongs of an entire northern Cree community. I persisted in working with Augie for all those years not simply because he was a victim, but because he is eminently worth getting to know.
David Carpenter, author of The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir by Joseph Auguste Merasty
Adventurous readers of Saskatchewan – I hope you too get to know my friend, the intemperate, irrepressible and heroic Augie Merasty. His story is available at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Saskatoon.
