Campaign urges people to read memoir
David Carpenter didn’t realize how many people The Education of Augie Merasty would touch when he wrote it. Flash forward a few years and the residential school memoir has been chosen for the inaugural One Book One Province Saskatchewan project.
“I was just delighted because Augie’s almost 87, he’s had a very hard life. He was traumatized at a very young age and he’s haunted by the violence done to him when he was a little boy and now suddenly for the past year and more his story is getting out all over the country,” Carpenter said.
The Education of Augie Merasty tells the story of Merasty, who was a student at St. Therese Residential School in Sturgeon Landing, and how the residential school experience affected him. Carpenter co-wrote the book with Merasty, who provided Carpenter with his own writings on his life.
The One Book One Province campaign, which kicks off Mar. 1, will see the Saskatchewan Library Association encouraging people across the province to read the book throughout March.
“Getting as many people in the province to read about one young boy’s story and then talking about it and having events around it will just help all of us as a community learn about (the residential school history),” said Colleen Murphy, chair of the committee of the Saskatchewan Library Association.
The campaign will include Carpenter travelling around the province to various promotional events.
The first event will be a kickoff night at the First Nations University on Wednesday which will include a reading by Carpenter and a first-hand account of the residential school experience by Blair Stonechild, a professor at FNU.
Carpenter will then take off on the tour around the province, with Merasty joining him at a few events. Merasty’s daughter, Arlene Merasty, is currently working on co-ordinating with family members to take him to as many events as possible.
Merasty is currently living in a personal care home in Prince Albert and is starting to get dementia. Arlene said the family is working on moving him to a care home in La Ronge where most of them live.
For Arlene it’s been exciting seeing how much of an impact her father’s book has made since it was first published in 2015.
Arlene works at a group home which houses children from Grandmother’s Bay who are attending high school in La Ronge. One day one of the girls came home and told Arlene she had to do a book report.
“She took her books out and the booklet came sliding out and holy moly it was my dad’s book. So they have it in the school ... I smiled. I almost cried. I was so happy,” Arlene said.
For Arlene any opportunity to have people read her father’s book, including the One Book One Province campaign, is important.
“A lot of thoughts have went through my head over the year and I’m just really happy that everybody’s going to know really what happened, the truth,” she said.