Family of Chanie Wenjack attends Gord Downie’s The Secret Path premier

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY—Three auditorium rows of Chanie Wenjack’s family and community members witnessed the CBC premiere broadcast of Gord Downie’s animated film about Wenjack’s final days along a railway track.

“It was great to see a lot of Charlie [Chanie] Wenjack’s family,” says Fort William Councillor Michele Solomon. “It’s great that they could be here. I’m sure this has had some stress for them as well as some tears, but also some healing along the way as well.”

Wenjack, a 12-year-old residential school student from the remote fly-in community of Marten Falls, ran away from residential school and died along the railway track in 1966. His body was found on Oct. 23, 1966, about 60 kilometres from the residential school in Kenora.

Downie’s film, The Secret Path, was screened on Oct. 23 at the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium and across the country on CBC.

“I found the presentation to be a great way to open the conversation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people,” Solomon says. “It was a great opportunity to have this in the privacy of people’s homes to kind of take in some portrayal of what took place way back then.”

Downie’s film is available online.

The Secret Path begins with an aerial view of the approach to Marten Falls and Downie’s narration about why he wanted to make the film.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Downie says in the film. “By best, I just mean it helps my heart a little bit. This is what I want to do. Nothing else really matters to me.”

Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, chair on truth and reconciliation at Lakehead University and a Georgina Island citizen, says the film is also a conversation about truth and reconciliation.

“The truth that happened to these children who were put into these schools — when he died I was 10 years old,” Wesley-Esquimaux says. “I didn’t go to those schools but my parents did. I had a different life, but at the same time I could have been in those schools as well.”

The film premiere was sponsored by CBC and Nishnawbe Aski Nation, with a symposium and light refreshments from 7-8 p.m.; a traditional ceremony with drumming, prayers and comments by dignitaries, including Wenjack’s sister Pearl Wenjack, Thunder Bay Councillor Linda Rydholm and Thunder Bay Police Services Chief JP Levesque, from 8-9 p.m.; the film broadcast from 9-10 p.m.; and a talk after the film by Mike Downie, one of the executive producers of the film and Gord’s older brother.

“This is about reconciliation, so having all those people speak, the city [councilor] and JP Levesque is a very important part of this conversation,” Wesley-Esquimaux says. “I hope that came home to everybody here. The people here are the people who are onside; there’s a lot of people who are not as of yet in the city. I think we need to understand that we all have an obligation and a responsibility to get to those people and do what we can to help them understand why this is important.”

Pearl Wenjack says it was not an easy journey with the film project, noting that she and her family have shed “a lot of tears and a lot of grief.”

“I was just saying to my son who was sitting beside me: ‘We are almost home,’” Wenjack says. “That’s what Charlie [Chaney] wanted to do; he just wanted to go home. That’s all I want to do; I just want to go home now.”

Wenjack sang a Cree hymn for the audience before finishing her comments by thanking the Downie brothers.

“We’ve adopted them as our blood brothers.”