Brown Tom’s Schooldays, is a semi-autobiographical collection of stories about growing up in a residential school in Ontario in the early 1900s.
The author is the late Enos Montour, a Delaware writer from Six Nations of the Grand River. As the title suggests, it is an ironic play on Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Thomas Hughes’s popular novel about his boyhood in an English school.
In Brown Tom’s Schooldays, instead of the main character being an English boy at an elite private boarding school, he is Tom Hemlock, a First Nations boy attending Mount Elgin Indian Residential School between 1910 and 1915. Montour’s narrative is the only known substantive writing by a Mount Elgin student. His stories unfold school life, illuminating the physical and social world of Mount Elgin in powerful ways.
