The Education of Augie Merasty - Book/Board combo

The next graphic honours a collaboration with University of Regina Press, publishers of the National Bestseller The Education of Augie Merasty — A Residential School Memoir. This Colonialism Skateboards graphic explores the life of the late Joseph “Augie” Merasty, a Cree man who survived the St. Therese Residential School. His memoir offers a first hand account of the physical, emotional, and psychological violence of the Residential School system and the federal policy of forced assimilation that attempted to erase Indigenous identity.

Augie Merasty attended St. Therese Residential School from 1935 to 1944, a period when government funded, church run schools enforced aggressive assimilation policies on Indigenous children. The memoir is both a personal testimony and a historical document: it records one man’s survival while illuminating the broader system that affected an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children. Merasty’s story contributes to public understanding and to the ongoing work of truth, accountability, and reconciliation. This release is meant to educate and prompt reflection. By placing Merasty’s memoir on a skateboard graphic, Colonialism aims to bring this history into everyday spaces like skate parks, streets, and homes, so that the story of Residential Schools is not confined to textbooks but remains present in public memory. Remembering these stories is a step toward justice and toward honouring survivors.

During the 1860s and 1870s, as European settlement pushed west, missionaries established small boarding schools across the prairies, the North, and parts of British Columbia to assimilate Indigenous children. Although the federal government funded some of these early schools, by the 1880s, Ottawa formally partnered with Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, United, and Presbyterian churches to create larger, industrial style institutions across Western Canada. More than 130 Residential Schools would eventually operate, forcing about 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children to attend. Most schools closed by the 1980s, with the last one shutting down in 1996 near Regina.

Inside these institutions, children faced genocide: separation from family, bans on language and ceremony, and widespread abuse. While a few former students recall positive moments, the overwhelming majority describe loneliness, hunger, illness, inadequate education, and physical, sexual, and emotional violence. St. Anne’s in Albany, Ontario, is one of the most extreme examples, where staff used an electric chair to punish children. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has documented more than 6,000 student deaths, though the real number is believed to be higher. According to CBC News, children in Residential Schools faced a higher risk of dying than Canadians serving in the Second World War.

This history continues to shape the lives of Indigenous people today. Many survivors carried their trauma alone, and the intergenerational impacts are seen in higher rates of suicide, addiction, incarceration, and disease, along with lower life expectancy, socioeconomic status, and educational outcomes. For decades, these realities were blamed on Indigenous peoples themselves, rather than understood as the direct result of colonialism, assimilation policies, and the Residential School system.

UN Definition of Genocide

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Resources

CBC Books. (n.d.). The education of Augie Merasty. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.cbc.ca/books

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

Merasty, J. A., & McLeod, D. (2015). The education of Augie Merasty: A residential school memoir. University of Regina Press.

United Nations. (n.d.). Definition of genocide. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition