The next hundred years are going to be painful as we come to know Chanie Wenjack and thousands like him – as we find out about ourselves, about all of us – but only when we do can we truly call ourselves, "Canada." I have always wondered why, even as a kid, I never thought of Canada as a country – It’s not a popular thought you keep it to yourself – I never wrote of it as so. Because at the same time that aboriginal people were being demeaned in the schools and their culture and language were being taken away from them and they were being told that they were inferior, they were pagans, that they were heathens and savages and that they were unworthy of being respected - that very same message was being given to the non-aboriginal children in the public schools as well…They need to know that history includes them.” (Murray Sinclair, Ottawa Citizen, May 24, 2015)
I am trying in this small way to help spread what Murray Sinclair said, “This is not an aboriginal problem. This is a Canadian problem. It will take seven generations to fix this. We weren’t taught it it was hardly ever mentioned.Īll of those Governments, and all of those Churches, for all of those years, misused themselves. “White” Canada knew – on somebody’s purpose – nothing about this. We are all accountable, but this begins in the late 1800s and goes to 1996. 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.Ĭhanie haunts me.
Gord downie how to#
He didn’t know where it was, nor know how to find it, but, like so many kids - more than anyone will be able to imagine - he tried.
Mike Downie introduced me to Chanie Wenjack he gave me the story from Ian Adam’s Maclean’s magazine story dating back to February 6, 1967, “The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack.”Ĭhanie was a young boy who died on October 22, 1966, walking the railroad tracks, trying to escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School to walk home.
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