Blue Fox: Boy of the Backwater Boarding School - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Blue Fox: Boy of the Backwater Boarding School is a novel written for adults and near adults. It is not a gentle story; to be honest it couldn’t be. The story is set in 1870 among Indigenous Americans in the pristine upper Midwest – straddling the US Canadian border. It wrestles with everything dreadful about the retraining schools for American Indian children. The schools were created by the US and Canadian governments and run by Christian churches to force the youngest Indians to renounce everything Indian and accept everything white-man-Christian.
It paints a picture of brotherly love and loyalty, devotion to family, and to the positive values the Indian villages presented for their children. The young characters – the title boy, age 14 and his younger brother – 10 – bring to life the loving ways they knew among their tribe and contrasts that with the life of punishment, humiliation, and pain within the walls of the Backwater Boarding School (fictional). The story is based on voluminous reports of the painful and inhuman treatment documented in oral history and by many of the residents’ sworn statements before they died in old age.
Along the way, the boys explore the great questions of life and the universe; their experiences and situation often does not allow them to find the answers one would wish for them. Amid the tragedy and constant fear, they find some humor and purpose. The reader will be caught up in the excitement and adventure, he will hurt with children during bad times, and be pleased for them when they achieve little victories. He will loathe the bad guys and weep for the children. He will cheer, teary eyed, for the youngsters as the story swirls to its climax in the final, heroic, chapter. The thoughtful reader will encounter new perspectives and discover new questions with which she and he must thoughtfully wrestle.

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