Boys’ Stories of Their Time in a Residential School


Book Description

This book provides rich insights into the pre and post care experiences of boys who were pupils in a residential school where the author worked over the course of the 1980s. It describes the boys’ trajectories through life, as well as detailing the rhythms, rituals, routines, and relationships that existed in the school. While the focus is on the (former) boys’ experiences, these are augmented by interview material from staff members, including religious Brothers, who worked in the school. Together, these different perspectives provide unique insights into an area of social work history that is ill-served by existing accounts, making the book required reading for all scholars and students of social work; social and oral history; narrative sociology; criminology and desistance and social policy.




Written as I Remember It


Book Description

Long before vacationers discovered BC’s Sunshine Coast, the Sliammon, a Coast Salish people, called the region home. In this remarkable book, Sliammon elder Elsie Paul collaborates with a scholar, Paige Raibmon, and her granddaughter, Harmony Johnson, to tell her life story and the history of her people, in her own words and storytelling style. Raised by her grandparents who took her on their seasonal travels, Paul spent most of her childhood learning Sliammon ways, teachings, and stories and is one of the last surviving mother-tongue speakers of the Sliammon language. She shares this traditional knowledge with future generations in Written as I Remember It.




Boys' Stories of Their Time in a Residential School


Book Description

"This book provides rich insights into the pre and post care experiences of boys who were pupils in a residential school where the author worked over the course of the 1980s. It describes the boys' trajectories through life, as well as detailing the rhythms, rituals, routines and relationships that existed in the school. While the focus is on the (former) boys' experiences, these are augmented by interview material from staff members, including religious Brothers, who worked in the school. Together, these different perspectives provide unique insights to an area of social work history that is ill-served by existing accounts, making the book required reading for all scholars and students of social work; social and oral history; narrative sociology; criminology and desistance and social policy"--




Out of the Depths


Book Description

The Indian Residential School in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established by the Canadian government in 1929 to provide residential education to orphan, destitute, neglected, and other Mi'kmaw Indian children aged 7-16. Since many Indian parents were poor and unable to provide for their children, they felt the school was a chance for their children to have adequate clothing and food as well as an education. The parents did not understand that when they signed school registration papers, they were transferring guardianship of their children to the school principal. The school's staff of 10 nuns and a priest (principal) provided room and board and education to an annual population of about 200 until the school closed in 1967. The 5-year-old author and her brother and sister were sent to the school in 1936. She was a resident at the school for 11 years. This book relates her memories, and other students' memories, of their life at the school: physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by the nuns and priest; inadequate food and clothing; lack of care when ill or injured; enforced labor in the kitchen, laundry, barn, and fields; and beatings for speaking their native language. Even though some children were allowed to go home for summer vacation and parents were allowed to visit on Sunday, no student was allowed to permanently leave the school. The school's suppression of the children's Indian language, culture, and heritage caused severe social and personal adjustment problems, which are related through quotations from former students. Rumored to have been built on an old Indian burial ground, and haunted, the remnants of the school mysteriously burned down in 1986. Government officials and the Catholic church apologized to Native people for treatment at the school in 1991. Chapters are: "Origins" (nonformal Native education and child rearing); "Everyday Life at the School"; "Work and Play"; "Rewards and Punishments"; "Ghosts and Hauntings"; "Resistance"; "The End of the School"; "The Official Story"; and "Out of the Depths." Includes photographs. (SAS) -- from ERIC dbase.




The White House Boys


Book Description

Hidden far from sight, deep in the thick underbrush of the North Florida woods are the ghostly graves of more than thirty unidentified bodies, some of which are thought to be children who were beaten to death at the old Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna. It is suspected that many more bodies will be found in the fields and swamplands surrounding the institution. Investigations into the unmarked graves have compelled many grown men to come forward and share their stories of the abuses they endured and the atrocities they witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s at the institution. The White House Boys: An American Tragedy is the true story of the horrors recalled by Roger Dean Kiser, one of the boys incarcerated at the facility in the late fifties for the crime of being a confused, unwanted, and wayward child. In a style reminiscent of the works of Mark Twain, Kiser recollects the horrifying verbal, sexual, and physical abuse he and other innocent young boys endured at the hands of their "caretakers." Questions remain unanswered and theories abound, but Roger and the other 'White House Boys' are determined to learn the truth and see justice served.




Boarding School Syndrome


Book Description

Boarding School Syndrome is an analysis of the trauma of the 'privileged' child sent to boarding school at a young age. Innovative and challenging, Joy Schaverien offers a psychological analysis of the long-established British and colonial preparatory and public boarding school tradition. Richly illustrated with pictures and the narratives of adult ex-boarders in psychotherapy, the book demonstrates how some forms of enduring distress in adult life may be traced back to the early losses of home and family. Developed from clinical research and informed by attachment and child development theories ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ is a new term that offers a theoretical framework on which the psychotherapeutic treatment of ex-boarders may build. Divided into four parts, History: In the Name of Privilege; Exile and Healing; Broken Attachments: A Hidden Trauma, and The Boarding School Body, the book includes vivid case studies of ex-boarders in psychotherapy. Their accounts reveal details of the suffering endured: loss, bereavement and captivity are sometimes compounded by physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Here, Joy Schaverien shows how many boarders adopt unconscious coping strategies including dissociative amnesia resulting in a psychological split between the 'home self' and the 'boarding school self'. This pattern may continue into adult life, causing difficulties in intimate relationships, generalized depression and separation anxiety amongst other forms of psychological distress. Boarding School Syndrome demonstrates how boarding school may damage those it is meant to be a reward and discusses the wider implications of this tradition. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, art psychotherapists, counsellors and others interested in the psychological, cultural and international legacy of this tradition including ex-boarders and their partners.




Indian Horse


Book Description

A First Nations former hockey star looks back on his life as he undergoes treatment for alcoholism in this novel from the author of Dream Wheels. Saul Indian Horse is a child when his family retreats into the woods. Among the lakes and the cedars, they attempt to reconnect with half-forgotten traditions and hide from the authorities who have been kidnapping Ojibway youth. But when winter approaches, Saul loses everything: his brother, his parents, his beloved grandmother—and then his home itself. Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Rising at dawn to practice alone, Saul proves determined and undeniably gifted. His intuition and vision are unmatched. His speed is remarkable. Together they open doors for him: away from the school, into an all-Ojibway amateur circuit, and finally within grasp of a professional career. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the indignities and the taunts, the racism and the hatred—the harshness of a world that will never welcome him, tied inexorably to the sport he loves. Spare and compact yet undeniably rich, Indian Horse is at once a heartbreaking account of a dark chapter in our history and a moving coming-of-age story. “Shocking and alien, valuable and true… A master of empathy.”—Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Golden Age “A severe yet beautiful novel…. Indian Horse finds the granite solidity of Wagamese’s prose polished to a lustrous sheen; brisk, brief, sharp chapters propel the reader forward.”—Donna Bailey Nurse, National Post (Toronto)




The House in the Cerulean Sea


Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER! A 2021 Alex Award winner! The 2021 RUSA Reading List: Fantasy Winner! An Indie Next Pick! One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2020" One of Book Riot’s “20 Must-Read Feel-Good Fantasies” Lambda Literary Award-winning author TJ Klune’s bestselling, breakout contemporary fantasy that's "1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in." (Gail Carriger) Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light. The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours. "1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in." —Gail Carriger, New York Times bestselling author of Soulless At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Two Roads


Book Description

A boy discovers his Native American heritage in this Depression-era tale of identity and friendship by the author of Code Talker It's 1932, and twelve-year-old Cal Black and his Pop have been riding the rails for years after losing their farm in the Great Depression. Cal likes being a "knight of the road" with Pop, even if they're broke. But then Pop has to go to Washington, DC--some of his fellow veterans are marching for their government checks, and Pop wants to make sure he gets his due--and Cal can't go with him. So Pop tells Cal something he never knew before: Pop is actually a Creek Indian, which means Cal is too. And Pop has decided to send Cal to a government boarding school for Native Americans in Oklahoma called the Challagi School. At school, the other Creek boys quickly take Cal under their wings. Even in the harsh, miserable conditions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, he begins to learn about his people's history and heritage. He learns their language and customs. And most of all, he learns how to find strength in a group of friends who have nothing beyond each other.




Indian School Days


Book Description

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.