He told the Globe and Mail, “It has been reconciliation in action. Ry Moran, the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, also travelled with Mr.
It will take seven generations to fix this. “All those governments, and all of those churches, for all of those years, misused themselves,” Downie said in his statement. That inquiry found that the institutions funded by the federal government and operated by churches were aimed at cultural genocide. The Senator Murray Sinclair created an organization that spent several years recording the experiences of survivors of the residential schools. He was wearing only thin clothing when he set out on journey through dense bush and he did not know the way home. Chanie Wenjack lived and died, and no one knows his story.’Ĭhanie collapsed from cold and hunger while trying to make it back to Marten Falls from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School. Why? Maybe because it’s easier to live with ourselves if we pretend stories like Chanie’s never happened. This is such a massive part of our country’s history, yet our schools didn’t teach us about it. He continues about the education system, “Growing up white in Southern Ontario, I never learned about Chanie Wenjack or about any of the tens of thousands of other indigenous children like him who were part of Canada’s residential school system. Chanie’s story is one that will not let you go once you hear it. ‘Before we left the coffee shop I knew I was going to do it. Jeff Lemire’s statement on the website describes his first meeting with Gord and Mike about the project. According to the website, ‘Secret Path acknowledges a dark part of Canada’s history – the long-supressed mistreatment of Indigenous children and families by the residential school system – with the hope of starting our country on a road to reconciliation.’ In winter 2014, Gord and Mike brought the recently finished music to comic artist Jeff Lemire for his help illustrating Chanie’s story, bringing him and the many children like him to life. We are not the country we thought we were.”
“I never knew Chanie, the child his teachers misnamed Charlie, but I will always love him,” Mr. Downie recently travelled to Marten Falls First Nation, a remote Ontario reserve 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, to visit with the family of Chanie Wenjack, whose body was found beside a railway track. According to the official Secret Path website, Gord was introduced to Chanie Wenjack (miscalled “Charlie” by his teachers) by Mike Downie, his brother, who shared with him Ian Adams’ Maclean’s story from February 6, 1967, “The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack.” Mr. Secret Path started as ten poems incited by the story of Chanie Wenjack, a twelve year-old boy who died on October 22, 1966, in flight from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario, walking home to the family he was taken from over 400 miles away. Gordon Downie performing in Guelph Ontario in 2001 (Wikipedia)
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