From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing

5. A Residential School Memoir: Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days

88 The publication in 1988 of Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days initiated an explosion of writing about residential schools in Canada. A narrative re-creation of life at the Garnier Residential School for Boys by one of its “former […] inmates” (11), Johnston’s memoir helped mobilize a collective response to these institutions.1 Since its publication, a great deal more attention has been directed to the residential school experience, a chapter of Canadian history that extended from the 1870s to the early 1980s. In the same year that Johnston’s residential school memoir was published , Celia Haig-Brown’s Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School also appeared. A year later, the CBC aired Where the Spirit Lives, a film that depicts the devastating effects of an Anglican residential school on an Akainaa (Blood) community in Alberta. Increased media coverage of residential schools followed over the next two years, including an hour-long special by The Fifth Estate and commissioned films broadcast on TVO and VisionTV.2 A number of books on residential schools were published, including survivor accounts such as Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of the Depths (1992), autobiographies such as Rita Joe’s Song of Rita Joe (1996) and Tomson Highway’s loosely autobiographical novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1996), as well as a substantial body of critical writing by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers.3 The traumatic effects of residential FIVE A Residential School Memoir Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days schooling came to be known as “residential school syndrome.” This belated production of residential accounts produced a secondary effect: skepticism about their effects and actual audience. Do such accounts serve to purge a dominant culture’s sense of culpability or to heal a lingering pain in survivors and Aboriginal audiences?4 Indian School Days, because of its mild, nostalgic tone, could be considered a text that serves the first purpose—that is, of easing a collective guilt over residential schools. In his review of this book in Canadian Literature , Menno Boldt notes with disappointment Johnston’s glossing over of the pain of this experience. Boldt criticizes the lack of emotional development in the narrative as well as Johnston’s refraining from an explicit indictment of this institution. He also faults the generality with which Johnston depicts the experiences and conflicts in this place. “It seems the author has evaded or repressed the true meaning of his experience,” Boldt concludes (312). Boldt’s criticisms are interesting, because they unwittingly reveal the type of expectations formed by the wave of media attention described. Jamie S. Scott, on the other hand, finds Johnston’s refusal to submit to these preformed judgments to be a strength of this text. Johnston ’s “delicate balance between justified indignation and considered appreciation for the mixed blessings the school conferred upon its students ,” Scott maintains, is “a refusal to play upon the guilt-ridden posture ” of a liberal readership (151). Reviewer Lisa E. Emmerich joins Scott’s appraisal, finding Johnston’s “exploration of the relationships forged between students” and the varied, at times sympathetic, relationships formed between the boys and the Jesuits as a “poignant counterpoint to the familiar pairing of well meaning, ethnocentric efforts and the student alienation that policy frequently produced” (219). Johnston, as all of these authors point out, avoids a scriptedness in the way he represents this experience, submitting neither to assumptions of social disintegration nor to a dominant readership’s desire for a cathartic narrative. Johnston’s memoir is a much more resistant text than it might appear, not only in its resistance to this type of narrative scriptedness but also in its response to history. Indian School Days intervenes in the historical record with an unofficial version of life in a residential school. “None of the stories recounted in this text will be found recorded in any official or unofficial journals of the Garnier Residential School for Boys,” Johnston writes in his introduction (11). Francis Hart, in his essay “History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir” (1979), asserts a similar role for the memoir, distinct from that of institutional history. He describes the memoir as “the personal act of repossessing a public world, historical, institutional, collective” (195). “The memoirs are of a person,” Hart adds, A Residential School Memoir • 89 further characterizing this genre, “but they are ‘really’ of an event, an era, an institution, a class identity” (195). In her...