In Downie’s lyrics Chanie says: “I will not be struck. Nor is there anything suggesting physical or sexual abuse in the section about him in the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.Ĭhanie’s best friend testified at the inquest into his death that “he ran away because he was lonely.” One of Chanie’s public school teachers told the inquest he had said he longed to return to his family.īut Secret Path clearly implies that he died after fleeing abuse. Nothing that was written or said at the time of Chanie’s death suggests that he was physically or sexually abused while he was boarding at Cecilia Jeffrey. Wasacase had attended residential schools as a child and taught in residential schools at Birtle and Norway House, Manitoba, before becoming a vocational counsellor with Indian Affairs in Winnipeg. By 1960, the number of Aboriginal students in Canada attending “non-Indian schools” (9,479) was equal to the number living in residential schools (9,471).Ĭolin Wasacase, a Cree/Saulteaux from the Ochopowace Band east of Regina, was in charge of the 150 children boarding at Cecilia Jeffrey. The Indian Act had been amended in 1951 so the federal government could arrange with the provincial governments and school boards to have Aboriginal students educated in public schools. According to a detailed story about Chanie’s death published in Maclean’s in February, 1967, he was one of about 150 Aboriginal students who lived there while they were going to the public school.Īt the time, Chanie and the other children from remote reserves in the region were attending public schools because of a major shift in government policy. However, most of what is written and shown in these accounts about the tragic death of an Ojibway boy named Chanie Wenjack – an alleged victim of the residential school system whose frozen body was found curled up beside railway tracks in northwestern Ontario on the morning of Octoseveral days after he ran away from a former Indian residential school where he was boarding – is patently untrue.Ĭontrary to what children are being taught in Secret Path, 12-year-old Chanie was actually attending a public school in Kenora at the time of his death and only boarded at the nearby former Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, which was operated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada. It too is being widely used in Canadian classrooms. Celebrated Canadian author Joseph Boyden penned a novella on the same subject titled Wenjack. Downie also recorded a music album of the same name and an animated version of the story aired on CBC.
Children in schools across Canada are learning about the Indian residential schools through Secret Path, a 2016 graphic novel written by Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie and illustrated by Jeff Lemire.
0 kommentar(er)
