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The Secret Path Lesson 2

Charlie Wenjack was a 12-year-old Indigenous boy who attended a residential school in Kenora, Ontario and tragically died trying to walk 400 miles home. He struggled to adapt to the residential school that forced him to abandon his language and culture. Feeling lonely and homesick, Charlie ran away in October 1967 but sadly died of exposure just a short distance from the train tracks. His death highlighted the tragic conditions that many Indigenous children faced in the residential school system and the lack of care shown when they attempted to run away. It took decades for Charlie's story and the broader atrocities of residential schools to become more widely known in Canada.

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Jacky So
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44 views

The Secret Path Lesson 2

Charlie Wenjack was a 12-year-old Indigenous boy who attended a residential school in Kenora, Ontario and tragically died trying to walk 400 miles home. He struggled to adapt to the residential school that forced him to abandon his language and culture. Feeling lonely and homesick, Charlie ran away in October 1967 but sadly died of exposure just a short distance from the train tracks. His death highlighted the tragic conditions that many Indigenous children faced in the residential school system and the lack of care shown when they attempted to run away. It took decades for Charlie's story and the broader atrocities of residential schools to become more widely known in Canada.

Uploaded by

Jacky So
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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THE SECRET PATH

Lesson 2
Acknowledgement
And
Truth

Purpose: To learn the truth about what


happened to Chanie at Residential Schools.
The lonely death of Chanie Wenjack
Charlie was 12, and Indigenous. He
died as the white world’s rules had
forced him to live—cut off from his
people
Ian Adams
February 1, 1967
CHARLIE WENJACK would have been 13 years old on January 19,
and it’s possible that during his short and disturbed life someone
may have taken a snapshot of him — one of those laughing, open-
faced, blurred little pictures one so often sees of children. But if a
snap was taken, nobody knows where it is now. There are five
police pictures of Charlie, though. They are large 8-by-10 prints,
grey and underexposed, showing the thin, crumpled little body of a
12-year-old boy with a sharp-featured face. He is lying on his back
and his thin cotton clothing is obviously soaked. His feet, encased in
ankle-high leather boots, are oddly turned inward. In one of the
photographs an Ontario Provincial Police sergeant is pointing down
at Charlie’s body, where it lies beside the CNR track. It is the exact
spot where on the night of October 22 Charlie collapsed and died
from exposure and hunger . . . just four-and-a-half feet from the
trains that carry the white world by in warm and well-fed comfort.
When they found Charlie he didn’t have any identification. All they
got out of his pockets was a little glass jar with a screw top. Inside
were half a dozen wooden matches. They were all dry. And that’s all
he had.
Charlie Wenjack was an Ojibway Indian attending Cecilia
Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ont. He became
lonely and ran away. He died trying to walk 400 miles home to
his father, who lives and works on an isolated reservation in
northern Ontario. It is unlikely that Charlie ever understood
why he had to go to school and why it had to be such a long
way from home. It is even doubtful if his father really
understood either.
It’s not so unusual that Indian children run away from the
residential schools they are sent to. They do it all the time,
and they lose their toes and their fingers to frostbite.
Sometimes they lose a leg or an arm trying to climb aboard
freight trains. Occasionally, one of them dies. And perhaps
because they are Indians, no one seems to care very much.
So this, then, is the story of how a little boy met a terrible and
lonely death, of the handful of people who became involved,
and of a town that hardly noticed.
Even before Charlie ran away he was already running hard just to
keep pace with the bewildering white world he had suddenly been
thrust into. He didn’t start school until he was nine. The village he
came from, Ogoki Post on the Martin Falls reservation, didn’t have a
day school. Charlie arrived at the Cecilia Jeffrey School, which is run
by the Presbyterian Church and paid for by the federal government, in
the fall of 1963. Some 150 Indian children live at the school but are
integrated into the local school system. Consequently, Cecilia Jeffrey
is, for 10 months in the year, really nothing more than an enormous
dormitory. And Charlie, who understood hardly any English, spent the
first two years in grade one. He spent last year in what is called a
junior opportunity class. That means he was a slow learner and had
to be given special instruction in English and arithmetic. This fall he
wasn't quite good enough to go back into the grade system, so he
was placed in what is called a senior opportunity class. But there was
nothing stupid about Charlie. His principal of last year, Velda
MacMillan, believed she got to know him well. "The thing we
remember most about him was his sense of humor. If the teacher in
the class made a joke, a play on words, he was always the first to
catch on."
Charlie wasn't a strong boy. In fact, he was thin and sickly.
He carried an enormous, livid scar that ran in a loop from
high on his right chest, down and up over his back. It meant
that in early childhood his chest had been opened. Nobody
knows exactly when. "Indian children's early medical
records are practically impossible to track down," explains
Kenora’s public-health doctor, P. F. Playfair. The
postmortem that was later performed on Charlie by Dr.
Peter Pan. of Kenora, showed that his lungs were infected
at the time of his death.
Magazine Article Questions
• Why did Chanie’s story not become well known until
2016?
• What attitudes do you think some Canadians had about
Residential Schools?
• What allowed Chanie’s story and knowledge of
Residential Schools go ignored for so long?
Charlie Wenjack by Willie Dunn
1972
Walk on, little Charlie
Walk on through the snow.
Heading down the railway line,
Trying to make it home.
Well, he's made it forty miles,
Six hundred left to go.
It's a long old lonesome journey,
Shufflin' through the snow.

• Willie Dunn
Excerpt from Wenjack by Joseph
Boyden
Tonight is the night they line us up and then we climb in the
water tub, two, or three of us if we’re real skinny, and we
have to wash the back of the one in front. Then we get out
and Fish Belly rubs each of us with a wet towel. This
means tomorrow is prayer day. I can tell which niijii, which
friend, ran away from the school this week by the long red
marks on his back. Ever a lot of red marks. Ever a lot of
friends who ran away this week. But Fish Belly teacher has
Fish Belly friends who go out and catch them. We have a
secret path, but maybe it’s not so secret anymore. The Fish
Bellies are good at catching Indian children.
 
One day I will run. One day they won’t hurt me anymore.
Around 1867
• An “Indian Problem” was identified by some in the
Canadian government
• Aboriginal People were seen as loose-moralled, unclean,
backwards, and dangerous
• Government Report: called for “aggressive assimilation”
Residential Schools
• Began in 1834
• 1896: 45 Schools in operation
• Abuse began early on
• Report from 1901:
• 24% of all students who entered residential schools died
• File Hills Reserve school in Sask.
• 75% of student who entered the school died
1920s
• Residential School became mandatory
• RCMP forcibly remove children from their homes
1940s to 1950s
• Efforts to assimilate were not successful
• Many schools converted to day schools
• Government focused on Inuit children
1960s: The 60s Scoop
• Focus on moving children into the homes of White
Canadians instead of Residential schools
1970s
• Beginning in 1969, Residential School control was handed
over to some First Nations communities
• This happened slowly over 25 years
• 1996, the last residential school is closed
Residential School Impacts
The negative impacts that the Residential School System
had and continues to have on Aboriginal people are far
reaching and wrought much more damage than previously
imagined. Removing generations of children from the
families and communities and placing them in
environments of abuse and despair is now recognized as a
method of assimilation.
Residential Schools Impact
The prevalence of social and economic problems such as
homelessness, addictions, poverty, violence, chronic
illness, and disease among Aboriginal communities can be
directly attributed to the residential school experience and
intergenerational trauma. Given the disproportionate
occurrence of these afflictions among Aboriginal
populations, it is not surprising that negative stereotypes
have become accepted as reality.
I Will Not be Struck (16:20 to 20:20)
Journal Reflection
• Using evidence from the segment, what are some feelings
Chanie is expressing?
• Summarize the cause of his emotions?
• What emotions does this make you feel?
• How does the Truth of what happened to Chanie and
other students in Residential schools make you feel?

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