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“A septuagenarian member of the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwa tells a harrowing tale of mistreatment and racial prejudice as he movingly recalls his years as a ward of the state and indentured laborer in Minnesota during the 1930s…. Though he exposes the reality of a system that essentially legalized child abuse, Razor somehow manages to control his justifiable anger. A perfectly pitched memoir.”

Kirkus Reviews

“[A] stirring bittersweet memoir of growing up…. Written with great emotion and without self-pity.”

PAUL INGRAM,

Prairie Lights Books

“Razor speaks in the achingly honest voice of a young man grown old beyond his years…. [He] is the locust who slept before finally flying and, like the locust, his story teaches much about the cycle of destruction and endurance.”

The Circle

“Peter Razor’s coming-of-age story is a shocking revelation and succeeds where most other Native American autobiographies have failed. While the Locust Slept never confuses honesty with the truth, never descends into racial blaming, and refuses to use Ojibwe culture as a mirror in which the travesties of modern times are reflected. Instead, in a voice as simple and innocent as our childhood should be, he lets his experiences as an orphan at the State Public School in Owatonna and, later, those as a farm placement worker in Houston, Minnesota, tell the harrowing story of a lost generation of Indian children. While the Locust Slept is a treasure.”

DAVID TREUER,

author of Little and The Hiawatha

“Peter Razor spins an intense and endearing tale of an American Indian youth abandoned to the cruel mercy of the state. As memoir, his voice is amazingly unique—giving us a cultural story of human survival. As history, his work informs us of an almost hidden, dark time in our past.”

MARK ANTHONY ROLO (Bad River Ojibwe),

former editor, The Circle