The film sheds light on 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 anew on a road to reconciliation. The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie presents THE SECRET PATH, a new animated film telling the true story of Chanie Wenjack, a twelve year-old boy who died fifty years ago from hunger and exposure while fleeing from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario, 500 miles away from home. Please consider donating to the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund.In attendance: Executive Producer Mike Downie, Gord’s brother, as well as Buffalo Sabre Cody McCormick, who is of Oneida and Chippewa/Ojibway descent. It’s the only direction that will bring all of us home. The secret to setting out on this road to reconciliation is knowing we need to move away from fear, hate, and oppression. If there’s one thing I can promise you, it’s this: we will not be strangers to one another anymore. Like you, we have no idea what awaits us on the path. Like you, we’re heading out on a journey we hope will bring us home to peace, love, and safety. Canada didn’t just break the golden rule when they put you and thousands of others into systematic camps meant to assimilate you into ‘white Canada’, they decimated it. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s shameful, and, and it’s unforgivable, but it is so necessary to healing. We’re all working on getting past the facts, and sitting in the truth. We won’t ever know what Chanie was thinking as he blindly followed those railway tracks, hoping they would take him home, but in one single, devastating opening line on “The Stranger”, Gord Downie gives voice to his truth: “I am a stranger, you can’t see me / I am a stranger, do you know what I mean?” We most certainly are not the country we thought we were. Canadians have believed a manufactured truth about why indigenous people should be subjected to live in deplorable conditions and denied the basic rights of personhood, all the while ignoring one single, undeniable fact: indigenous people are human beings, too. For generations, Canadians have allowed truth to be twisted, altered, and ultimately used as a cloak to cover over fact. Truth is more malleable than fact, so much so that truth can actually be fabricated. It may not be pleasant, but no amount of scrub or spin can change fact. ![]() We are not the country we thought we were.” In Gord Downie’s words, Chanie’s story “…is Canada’s story. Gord Downie, his brother Mike Downie, artist Jeff Lemire, and the Wenjack family set out to tell Chanie’s story with the Secret Path project, to not only bring attention to the facts of Chanie Wenjack’s death, but to the underlying truth of his tragedy. They died because someone thought they were strangers, and believed that strangers needed to be feared. They died because one human being decided that another human being was less human than they were. Chanie and thousands upon thousands of other indigenous people died because of fear and intolerance over differences. ![]() ![]() He died because of misconceived prejudices, because of long-standing and factless bias against indigenous people. ![]() Chanie died because of government policies meant to exterminate all traces of his indigenous culture and traditions. Chanie died because he was taken from his home when he did not want to leave. As with most stories, though, Chanie’s has layers, has depth and context–it has truth–that can’t be cropped out and edited away.Ĭhanie died because he froze to death following a railway he hoped and believed would take him home. Chanie Wenjack died 50 years ago, cold and alone as he fled the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, an institution he was forced into attending. He wanted to be where he felt safe, surrounded by his familiars. Chanie Wenjack just wanted to go home, too. When I get scared, tired, or sick, I want to go home.
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