Residential school life through the eyes of a child Enos Montour’s Brown Tom’s Schooldays , self-published in 1985, tells the story of a young boy’s life at residential school. Drawn from Montour’s first-hand experiences at Mount Elgin Indian Residential School between 1910 and 1915, the book is an ironic play on “the school novel,” namely 1857’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. An accomplished literary text and uncommon chronicle of federal Indian schooling in the early twentieth century, Brown Tom’s Schooldays positions Brown Tom and his schoolmates as citizens of three worlds: the reserve, the “white man’s world,” and the school in between. It follows Tom leaving his family home, making friends, witnessing ill health and death, and enduring constant hunger. Born at Six Nations of the Grand River in 1899, Montour earned degrees in Arts and Divinity at McGill University and served as a United Church minister for more than thirty years, honing his writing in newspapers and magazines and publishing two books of family history. Brown Tom’s Schooldays reflects Montour’s intelligence and skill as well as his love of history, parody, and literature. This critical edition includes a foreword by the book’s original editor, Elizabeth Graham, and an afterword by Montour’s granddaughters, Mary Anderson and Margaret McKenzie. In her introduction, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum documents Montour’s life and work, details Brown Tom’s Schooldays ’s publication history, and offers further insight into the operations of Mount Elgin. Entertaining and emotionally riveting, Montour’s book opens a unique window into a key period in Canada’s residential school history. " Brown Tom's Schooldays is an excellent multi-facted exploration of growing up, lived experiences, and Canadian colonialism through the eyes of a youth. It can be joyous, enlightening, sombre, and revelatory all within a few pages. McCallum’s introduction offers new insights into the novel and increases its teachability and relevance to classroom use. Overall, Brown Tom is a book that is readily accessible from the senior grade school to university classroom environment." -- Karl Hele ― Anishinabek News "Like the book’s students, McCallum argues, Brown Tom’s Schooldays was forced to straddle worlds. It did not fit the expectations of many publishers, who searched for “more explicitly blunt and unpolished descriptions of Indigenous trauma.” The title itself―which Montour described as a “play on words with an ethnic twist”―riffs off Tom Brown’s School Days , Thomas Hughes’s fictionalized account of his adventures at an elite British boarding school. It foreshadows Montour’s light-hearted approach, which contrasts a simple and at times juvenile tone with the horrendous environment depicted. 'The brilliance of Brown Tom’s Schooldays lies not only in what Enos teaches us in the stories,” Elizabeth Graham declares in her foreword, “but in the important lesson that you can educate through humour.'" -- David Venn ― Literary Review of Canada " Brown Tom’s Schooldays is a literary artifact from the residential school era. In this fictionalized coming of age account, Enos Montour captures the youthful hopes, dreams, and disappointments of his real life upbringing at Mount Elgin, one of Canada’s earliest and longest running residential schools. Unique in style, tone, and perspective, Schooldays is an important read for anyone interested in understanding the residential school system and for all of us who call the lower Great Lakes home." -- Thomas Peace, Huron at Western University Enos T. Montour (1899–1984), BA, BD, DD (honoris causa) was a Delaware writer and United Church Minister from Six Nations of the Grand River. His work includes Brown Tom’s Schooldays , The Rockhound of New Jerusalem , and The Feathered U.E.L.s . Mary Jane Logan McCallum is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair at the University of Winnipeg. She teaches modern Indigenous history, especially First Nations health, education, labour, and social history.