Through transcendent prose, an Ojibwe man chronicles his survival of
abuse and bigotry at a state orphanage in the 1930s and the brutal farm
indenture that followed.
In stark, haunting prose, first-time author Peter Razor recalls his
early years as a ward of the State of Minnesota. Disclosing his story
through flashbacks and relying on research from his own case files,
Razor pieces together the shattered fragments of his boyhood into a
memoir that reads as compellingly as a novel.
Abandoned as an infant at the State Public School in Owatonna,
Minnesota, Razor was raised by abusive workers who thought of him as
nothing more than "a dirty Injun." Cut off from his family and his
heritage, he turns inward, forced to learn about the world on his own.
After failed attempts to run away from the orphanage, he is indentured
by the state to an abusive, reclusive farm family. Beaten, poorly fed,
clothed in rags, and worked like slave labor, he struggles to attend
high school and begins to dream of another life. Razor's stark and often
chilling story, devoid of self-pity, recalls with haunting clarity the
years he, like the locust, patiently waited to awaken and emerge.