DATE: October 22, 2024
MEMO TO: Sarah Midanik
CEO Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund
FROM: Robert MacBain
SUBJECT: Misinformation in our classrooms
COPY TO: David Akin
Jorge Barrera
Conrad Black
Chris Champion
Robert Fife
Michael Friscolanti
Terry Glavin
Paul Godfrey
Lorrie Goldstein
Nigel Hannaford
George Koch
Brian Lilley
Candice Malcolm
Tori Marlyn
Mark Milke
Steve Paikin
Rob Roberts
Denise Ryan
Paul Samyn
Peter Shawn Taylor
Joe Warmington
Anthony Wilson-Smith
Hello, Ms. Midanik:
An email that I received from the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund this morning claims that Charlie (aka “Chanie”) Wenjack “was taken from his family at nine years old and forced to attend the Cecilia Jeffrey Residential School in Kenora, Ontario.”
In fact, Charlie’s parents enrolled him at the school on a voluntary basis and wrote letters to the principal thanking him for taking good care of their son.
After Charlie’s body was returned to Ogoki Post, his father, as was his right, said he was not going to allow his three daughters to return to the school with the Indigenous principal.
None of the 150 children were “forced” to attend the school.
Your email says Charlie – the name his family always used – “ran away from Cecilia Jeffrey in an attempt to reunite with his family 600 kilometres away.”
There is no evidence to support that statement.
As I document in my 2023 Lonely Death of an Ojibway Boy, Charlie tagged along when two orphaned brothers decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit their uncle who had a cabin about 30 kilometres away.
If it had been raining that bright Sunday afternoon in October 1966, Charlie would most likely have been sleeping safe and sound in the school dormitory that night.
Your email says Charlie “succumbed to starvation and exposure.”
There is no mention of starvation in the coroner’s report.
You also claim that Charlie’s death “became the first to spark a formal investigation into the treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools.”
Charlie’s was not the first inquest.
An inquest was held in 1902 into the death of an eight-year-old boy whose father found him dead from exposure after running away from Williams Lake Indian Industrial School (between Kamloops and Prince George).
In 1937, an inquest was held into the deaths of four boys who ran away from the Lejac School, west of Prince George, and were found frozen to death on a lake within half a mile of their village.
Your email says the jury “released a report that highlighted the emotional and adjustment problems faced by Indigenous children in residential schools.”
However, you omit the fact that the jury found that a white man at whose cabin Charlie and his two friends spent a night and an Ojibway trapper with whom Charlie spent four days should have notified the police or the school.
Today’s email provides further evidence of the misinformation your organizations has been disseminating since October 2016.
The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund’s premier publication, Secret Path, for example, claims that school officials changed the boy’s name from “Chanie” to Charlie. In fact, his family has always called him Charlie.
While speaking at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Winnipeg in June, 2010, Charlie’s oldest sister, Daisy Munroe, said: “My brother Charlie he died running away from school. He was only twelve.”
“Here’s a little guy that looks like and feels like Charlie, you know,” she said with a big smile. “I want to take him home. I don’t know if he’s going to agree with that. He looks mischievous.”
In speaking about the little boy who reminded her of Charlie, Ms. Achneepineskum said: “When he smiles, you could just see that mischievous look, you know. And I said ‘Oh, my goodness, you know, this is Charlie’. Charlie was always mischievous and he was a happy kid. He excelled in dancing. He excelled in just enjoying the moment that he was given.”
While describing a picture the little boy who reminded her of Charlie had drawn, Ms. Achneepineskum said it showed “Charlie on the railway tracks.”
An introductory note accompanying an audiotape of Ms. Achneepineskum being interviewed by the CBC’s Carol Off on As It Happens on October 20, 2016, said she referred to her brother as “Charlie”.
In the film version of Secret Path, Ms. Achneepineskum says: “You may be connected to somebody almost like a sister and a brother. And I think that’s why Gord [Downie] was connected to Charlie.”
She called her brother “Charlie” throughout an October 2019, interactive podcast with hundreds of students from across Canada and in the United States.
When Charlie’s family and relatives show up at special events honoring his memory, they wear blue T-shirts with the name Charlie Wenjack embossed on the front.
Charlie’s mother died in September 2017, at the age of 89. Her obituary lists him as “Charlie”. The marker on his grave at Ogoki Post says: “CHARLES WENJACK”.
As my research has shown, there never was a person named “Chanie” Wenjack.
However, because Secret Path changed Charlie’s name to “Chanie”, that’s the name used in buildings named in his memory, books about him, more than 50 “Legacy Spaces” sponsored by banks, major retailers, universities, performing arts centres, governments and others and in all newspaper, radio and TV reports.
Not only did the book get Charlie’s name wrong, it misrepresented his experience at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School.
Despite the fact the school was operated by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Protestant Presbyterian Church in Canada, Secret Path – which I have been given to understand is used in more than 65,000 classrooms across Canada and in some parts of the United States — has drawings showing Catholic nuns in habits delousing an emaciated-looking Charlie and other Ojibway boys who are covering their genitals with their hands.
A priest with a large white cross on his neck drags a screaming girl across the playground. A young boy dressed only in pyjama bottoms yells in pain as a nun with a big cross hanging from her neck yanks his ear.
Children reading Secret Path see a priest in the dormitory doorway as Charlie watches anxiously from his bed. There’s a closeup of the priest’s crotch followed by a drawing of his hand reaching out for the terrified boy.
Gord Downie’s lyrics say: “I heard them in the dark. Heard the things they do. I heard heavy whispers. Whispering, ‘Don’t let this touch you’.”
Towards the end of Secret Path, there’s a drawing showing Charlie stumbling along snow-covered railway tracks in a failed attempt to reach his far-away home. A long, bony hand with open fingers stretches out across the sky above him. And then, he’s shown looking warily at an imaginary male in clerical collar with a white cross on his neck looking menacingly at him from among the trees.
There is no evidence that Charlie Wenjack was sexually abused by any member of the staff at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, let alone by a pedophile Catholic priest. There were no nuns or priests at the school. None of the staff wore clerical garb.
There’s a drawing showing a shivering Charlie sitting alone on the railway tracks beside a small fire. Gord Downie’s lyrics say: “Run along the river. On the Secret Path. I will not be struck. I’m not going back.”
There is no evidence that Charlie was physically abused at any time during the three years he was at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School.
The online order form for Secret Path says: “Working with [Gord] Downie’s poetry and music, [Jeff] Lemire has created a powerful visual representation of the life of Chanie Wenjack.” The text on the back cover says Charlie died “trying to escape [emphasis added] the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School”.
There were no prison-like conditions from which Charlie or any other Indigenous student would have found it necessary to “escape”. The doors were not locked. There was no gate at the entrance. The children were free to come and go as they pleased – outside of class.
A significant number of them wrote letters saying they felt loved and cared for at the school. Some called the principal and his wife “Dad” and “Mom” and signed their letters “Love”. Many thanked them for being such good parents to them while they were living hundreds of kilometres away from home.
Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School was most definitely not the Catholic horror chamber depicted in Secret Path. And Charlie Wenjack’s name was not “Chanie”.
However, children reading Secret Path have no way of knowing that. Thousands of parents are unaware of the extent to which their children are being misinformed.
Best,
Robert MacBain
Toronto
My website is: www.RobertMacBainBooks.ca