#Gordon downie secret path songs how to

Gord Downie began Secret Path as ten poems, incited by the story of Chanie Wenjack, a twelve year-old boy who died in flight from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario, fifty years ago, walking home to the family he was taken from over 400 miles away. Every Canadian should know Chanie Wenjack's name and I hope Secret Path helps to make that a reality. I think, above all else, that's what Gord and I wanted to create: something that can't be ignored. It's our hope that one day Secret Path will be taught in schools and that it will help to shed a light on this all too often ignored part of Canada's past. It crosses languages and cultures and speaks to everyone, and I've always felt the medium of comics could do the same. Gord's haunting songs introduced me to Chanie Wenjack. I've spent the last three years living with Chanie's story and living inside Gord's music.

Chanie Wenjack lived and died, and no one knows his story. Why? Maybe because it's easier to live with ourselves if we pretend stories like Chanie's never happened. This is such a massive part of our country's history, yet our schools didn't teach us about it. Growing up white in Southern Ontario, I never learned about Chanie Wenjack or about any of the tens of thousands of other indigenous children like him who were part of Canada's residential school system. Chanie's story is one that will not let you go once you hear it. Before we left the coffee shop I knew I was going to do it. Gord was then in the final stages of recording his incredible songs based on Chanie's life and he shared the rough mixes with me in the hopes that I would be interested in creating a graphic novel to accompany his album. They wanted to discuss a potential project and, over coffee, they told me the story of Chanie 'Charlie' Wenjack. I first met Gord Downie and his brother Mike back in the winter of 2014. 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. It will take seven generations to fix this. We weren't taught it in school 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, but I will always love him.Ĭhanie haunts me.

#Gordon downie secret path songs how to

He didn't know where it was, nor 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 Adams' Maclean's magazine story dating back to February 6, 1967, 'The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack.'Ĭhanie, misnamed Charlie by his teachers, 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.