Joseph ‘Augie’ Merasty. Photo courtesy Facebook.
No one could have foreseen how the One Book One Province Saskatchewan reading tour of The Education of Augie Merasty would play out.
Originally, 87-year-old Joseph ‘Augie’ Merasty was slated to join co-author David Carpenter at the third stop on the tour in Prince Albert, a city where Merasty lived as homeless man for many years.
There, the two men would have been sure to touch on Merasty’s struggles with addiction, but also on how he felt about impacting people across the world after using the book to share his account of being abused when he was a kid attending St. Therese Residential School.
However, that plan changed when Carpenter received a phone call in late February.
“Just as I was packing to go to second venue (on the tour), that’s when he died,” Carpenter recalled in a phone interview on Friday.
Carpenter said the news hit him hard “because I kind of thought he was immortal.”
The tour itself took on a new tone after Merasty’s death made headlines across the country, bringing “a very sad but urgent sense of occasion” to the audience and to Carpenter.
Nowhere was this felt more strongly than in Prince Albert, where Carpenter estimates the audience of well over 200 people was 90 per cent Metis or northern Cree. It was a stark contrast to the “largely white” audiences he’s used to presenting to.
He said everyone it that room shared a sense of togetherness.
“We were all in the same room for the same purpose and they were so welcoming and responsive, and it was just a very touching occasion,” he said.
Merasty’s daughters Arlene and Joanne are among the members of Augie’s circle who shared their own stories about the man behind the book. The event became a celebration of Augie’s life, but Carpenter noted it wasn’t one that sugar-coated his flaws.
“When you read the lives of the saints, from what back in the medieval ages, you just see the light side. You don’t see the dark side. But I think it’s a much healthier story when you talk about somebody who’s obviously heroic, has shown great courage, to show that he had a dark side – to show that he was a disastrous father because he drank too much – I think that’s a very good thing,” he said.
Carpenter said the two daughters are now working on a memoir, which adds even more depth to the legacy of Augie.
As a non-Indigenous man, Carpenter said the tour has been a fulfilling experience.
“I feel for the first time in my life that I’m a small part of a big story – a story that is really reaching an awful lot of people up north, primarily northern Cree and Metis, and down here, primarily white folks, from here to Toronto and beyond,” he said.
The tour is heading into its last leg, and wraps up next week in Moose Jaw.