Enos T. Monture (Montour) (Lenape or Delaware)

Enos T. Montour (1899–1984) was a Delaware (Lenape) writer, United Church minister and residential-school survivor from Six Nations of the Grand River. His career joined pastoral service with journalism, family history and literary remembrance. He is particularly remembered for Brown Tom’s Schooldays, a fictionalized account of his childhood at Mount Elgin that preserves a student’s perspective on an institution usually documented through government and church records. His other books placed Indigenous families and individual achievement within the history of Grand River and Canada. 1, 2

Early life and residential schooling

Montour was born in 1899 into a Christian Delaware family at Six Nations of the Grand River. He attended Mount Elgin Indian Residential School near Muncey, Ontario, beginning in 1910, when he was about eleven. The United Church Archives and the publisher of the modern edition of his memoir give his attendance as 1910–1915; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s historical volume gives 1910–1914. This biography follows the former dating while acknowledging the difference in the records. 1, 3, 4

After Mount Elgin, he attended public high school in Hagersville. His subsequent writing revisited childhood with the perspective of someone who had lived through residential schooling and later entered the ministry. Brown Tom’s Schooldays describes separation from home, the making of friendships, illness, death and persistent hunger. These experiences establish the material conditions of school life alongside the attachments and ambitions of its pupils. 1, 3

Higher education and ministry

In 1919, Montour moved to Saskatchewan, where he worked for a Methodist farming family and attended church. A meeting in 1921 with Dr. Smythe of United Theological College encouraged him to pursue ministerial education in Montreal. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1927 and his Bachelor of Divinity in 1929, making him the first Indigenous Canadian to earn a BD degree. 12 Ordained in 1929, he served United Church charges in Saskatchewan, Quebec and Ontario. His ministry lasted more than thirty years. 1, 3, 5

In 1946, Montour returned to Six Nations to reorganize the Grand River Mission. This appointment brought pastoral work into close contact with the community whose history became central to his writing. He contributed articles to the Brantford Expositor. United Theological College awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1975, recognizing his contributions to Canadian and Indigenous history. 5

Journalism and intellectual exchange

An exchange with historian Paul Wallace in 1952 reveals Montour’s intellectual independence. Wallace sought his views on Longhouse religion after reading his journalism. Montour responded as a knowledgeable colleague, drawing on his community relationships and published work. Elizabeth Graham’s account of their correspondence also shows that he reconsidered attitudes inherited from his Christian upbringing when discussing Longhouse people. 5

The surviving record of his journalism extends beyond religious questions. A file in the Penny Petrone fonds at Lakehead University contains copies of Montour’s newspaper articles about warfare and Six Nations recruits, including discussions of Joseph Brant, Alfred Styres, Nathan Montour and Frank Montour. The archival description documents his attention to Indigenous participation in military history; it does not establish that he himself served in those wars. 6

Community history and biography

The Feathered U.E.L.’s: An Account of the Life and Times of Certain Canadian Native People appeared in 1973 through the United Church of Canada. Montour organized this history around the fictional Logan family and the Delaware Chapel at Grand River, bringing family narrative into conversation with religious change, treaties and military service. Its chronological reach extends from the period after the War of 1812 into the mid-twentieth century. 5, 7

Historian Carla A. R. Osborne situates the book within Indigenous historical writing. Her analysis emphasizes its combination of fiction and history, its attention to religious conflict and loyalty to the British Crown, and its inclusion of figures such as E. Pauline Johnson and Tom Longboat. The family framework allows broad developments to be encountered through community life. Readers should therefore distinguish its imaginative narrative from a conventional archival chronicle, while recognizing its value as an Indigenous interpretation of the past. 7

Montour also expressed his Loyalist interpretation publicly. A historical compilation preserved by the United Empire Loyalists’ Association records his support for branches among Mohawk communities and his insistence that Indigenous people belonged within the Loyalist story. That position illuminates the perspective of The Feathered U.E.L.’s without making it representative of every Indigenous understanding of Crown relations. 8

His second book, The Rockhound of New Jerusalem, published in 1981, commemorated his relative Gilbert Monture, the Mohawk mining engineer. Together, these two books show Montour’s commitment to preserving both the experiences of families and the careers of notable individuals. 5, 7

Brown Tom’s Schooldays

Montour’s most enduring literary work was developed over many years. Chapters were already taking shape in the 1950s; in his later life he worked with historian Elizabeth Graham to edit and type the manuscript. Brown Tom’s Schooldays follows Tom Hemlock, a First Nations boy at Mount Elgin. Its title reworks Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the influential British school novel published in 1857. 3, 9

The borrowed form gives Montour’s residential-school narrative a pointed literary relationship to a familiar account of English education. The publisher describes Tom as moving among the reserve, settler society and the school between them. Read in that context, the title invites readers to consider whose schooling is celebrated, how educational institutions shape belonging, and what opportunities await pupils after they leave. 3

Humour is integral to the work’s testimony. In the concluding chapter, reproduced in Broadview, students discuss future employment, education and the recovery of Indigenous rights while joking about their hunger. Montour then imagines the teachers questioning whether their schooling has prepared the children for either community life or a racist wider society. The literary device exposes uncertainty within the institution as well as the obstacles facing its graduates. 2

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission treated Montour’s account as an important historical source. Its volume on residential schools before 1939 discusses the book’s mixture of attachment and criticism, including homesickness and the disruption of familiar life. Elsewhere it draws on his account of the First World War, when relatives of staff and students enlisted and a shared honour roll temporarily altered relationships across racial divisions. These passages demonstrate why his perspective matters: it records everyday feeling and changing relationships that administrative documents can leave obscure. 4

Final years, publication and renewed readership

Montour died in 1984 at a seniors’ residence in Beamsville, Ontario, aged eighty-five. Brown Tom’s Schooldays was printed posthumously in May 1985 at a Waterloo copy shop. The modest production consisted of photocopied pages, a brown cardstock cover and plastic spiral binding. Its small circulation helps explain why this substantial literary testimony remained difficult to obtain for many years. 2, 9

In 2024, University of Manitoba Press issued a second edition edited by Mary Jane Logan McCallum. It includes Graham’s foreword, McCallum’s historical introduction and an afterword by Montour’s granddaughters, Mary Anderson and Margaret McKenzie. The accompanying glossary and bibliography of his writings give readers additional means to understand his language, references and wider body of work. 10, 11

At the November 2024 launch at Woodland Cultural Centre, Anderson recalled her grandfather’s humour and the hunger stories familiar to his family. The granddaughters requested that royalties from the new edition go to the Centre. This renewed circulation joins scholarly recovery with family memory and support for an Indigenous cultural institution. 9

Historical significance

Montour’s contribution rests on the range of Indigenous experience he preserved: a child’s school life, the histories of Grand River families, religious debate, military participation and professional achievement. His writings also require attentive reading. Christian conviction, Loyalist identification and affection for particular people coexist with observations about hunger, exclusion and racial prejudice. Those complexities are part of the historical record rather than reasons to flatten his account into a single position. 2, 4, 7

References

1. United Church of Canada Archives. Montour, Enos T., 1899–1984 [Internet]. Toronto: United Church of Canada Archives; [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://catalogue.unitedchurcharchives.ca/actor/browse?repository=3249&sf_culture=en&sort=alphabetic&sortDir=desc&subject=547217
2. McCallum MJL. Residential school survivor-turned-United Church minister details perpetual hunger at institution. Broadview [Internet]. 2024 Sep 27 [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://broadview.org/residential-school-survivor-re-released-book/
3. University of Manitoba Press. Brown Tom’s Schooldays (2nd edition) [Internet]. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press; 2024 [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://uofmpress.ca/books/brown-toms-schooldays
4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Canada’s residential schools: the history, part 1, origins to 1939. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Vol. 1. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press; 2015. p. 183–5, 372. Available from: https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/trc/IR4-9-1-1-2015-eng.pdf
5. Graham E. Letter from Enos Montour to Paul Wallace May 1952. Intersections. 2024;7(1):21–2. Available from: https://cha-shc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Intersections-7.1-online.pdf
6. Lakehead University Archives. Montour, Enos T. Rev. [archival description on the Internet]. Thunder Bay: Lakehead University; [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://archives.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/montour-enos-t-rev
7. Osborne CAR. “We know where we are”: the role of place in Indigenous historiography by Haudenosaunee and Northwest Métis historians [dissertation]. Victoria: University of Victoria; 2023. p. 272, 328–9. Available from: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/1828/15092/3/Osborne_Carla_PhD_2023.pdf
8. United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada. Branching out: Colonel John Butler Branch [historical compilation on the Internet]. [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://www.uelac.org/UELAC-history/Branching-Out/Branching-Out-Col-John-Butler.pdf
9. Beard C. Delaware writer’s story of residential school republished. BrantBeacon [Internet]. 2025 Jan 1 [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://www.brantbeacon.ca/delaware-writers-story-of-residential-school-republished/
10. Montour ET. Brown Tom’s Schooldays. 2nd ed. McCallum MJL, editor. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press; 2024. 216 p. doi:10.1515/9781772840889.
11. University of Winnipeg. Book tells the story of life in a residential school [Internet]. Winnipeg: University of Winnipeg; 2024 Nov 7 [cited 2026 Oct 11]. Available from: https://news.uwinnipeg.ca/book-tells-the-story-of-life-in-a-residential-school/
12. Indigenous Canadian Academic Milestones: A Timeline [user-supplied document]. [cited 2026 Oct 7]. Available from: https://indigenius-canada.wishartlab.com/pioneers/