Charlie. His real name is Chanie. But the ones who forced him to that school can't pronounce or don't care to listen and so say it with sharp tongues instead. If we could feel pity for this one, we would. His walk before, his walk to come. Neither is easy. All he wants is home. We follow now, we follow always, not to lead but to capture. Someone, yes, will capture this boy's life.The genesis of Wenjack sounds like the stuff of urban myth: After Gord Downie's brother rediscovered the old Maclean's article that was written shortly after the death of Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack, a plan was made for several Canadian artists to create memorials for the young boy upon the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2016, “without saying anything to Canada” about their intention. As a result, Downie wrote an album with both an associated graphic novel (Secret Path, illustrated by Jeff Lemire) and an animated film (created by Terril Calder), A Tribe Called Red included “interludes” about Chanie on their latest album (We Are the HalluciNation), and Joseph Boyden wrote Wenjack (illustrated by Ken Monkman), wrote and performed the spoken word interludes on A Tribe Called Red's album, and wrote a Heritage Minute about Chanie that began appearing this summer. As a celebrated author who obviously approached this project with much thought and passion, Boyden has created a slim novella – it doesn't take an hour to read – that not only brings Chanie Wenjack fully to life, but exposes the larger subject of residential schools; an issue we Canadians like to think of as in the past, but which obviously has had lasting negative effects on the survivors of (and the families of the victims of) those insidious institutions. This book is so short and so beautifully written that no Canadian has an excuse not to pick it up and join in the conversation.
We peer down at the boy, a dark speck on the tracks below, honking out a greeting to him, letting him know we see him, that we witness his lonely walk now a torture. As we follow the tracks that cut through rocks and muskeg and bush we talk back and forth among ourselves about how far we think the boy can go before his body fails. Not far. Our shining eyes catch the day's low light and we can see how these tracks we follow from above stretch impossibly across the harsh earth. For all the chance he has we might as well try to fly to the near-full moon that plans to appear, if only briefly, tonight.One warm October afternoon in 1966, twelve-year-old Chanie and two of his friends decided to run away from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario (nine other children attempted to run away that day and were all quickly caught). The weather turned cold and wet, and after becoming separated from his friends, Chanie continued to follow the train tracks that he vaguely remembered would lead him to his family home; not knowing that that home was 600 km away. Within four days of making his escape, Chanie was found dead beside those unending tracks. In Boyden's retelling of this story, we move between Chanie's first-person experience (of his desperate flight and his recollections of the abuse he was trying to escape at the school), and the points-of-view of various animals that watch his route through the forest; these creatures (from Lynx to Wood Tick) actually being manitous, or Anishinaabe spirits, that have taken on animal forms to bear witness to Chanie's end.
Despite Chanie and his friends referring to the teachers at their residential school as “Fish Bellies”, Wenjack isn't about overtly blaming “the white man” for what happens to these boys; this is simply Chanie's true story (and while it's obvious that responsibility does fall on Canada's official residential school policy of trying to “kill the Indian in the child”, this book reads more nuanced and less angry than the facts might reasonably provoke). On its own, Wenjack is a quietly powerful read, fully displaying Boyden's gifts of capturing people and nature. As Boyden said in an interview with The Globe and Mail, his intention with this book is for “us as Canadians to understand the fuller history of our country, to take it upon him or herself to learn beyond what you weren’t taught in school. And the importance of that. It’s not so we feel guilty or bad for what people we never met did, it’s beyond that. It’s how do we come together as a nation and move forward together”. And doesn't that sound important? I would encourage everyone to read Wenjack, and the Maclean's article that prompted this project (which, despite being quite short, did a great job of capturing the mood on the scene in the aftermath of Chanie's death), and also take the time to watch the Heritage Minute: as the camera pans back in the final shot, showing young Chanie laying prone beside the tracks and those familiar words appear – A Part Of Our Heritage – you can't help but acknowledge, “This is a part of our heritage”. We should all have the courage and the openness to bear witness to that fact.
