Consequently, Cecilia Jeffrey is, for 10 months in the year, really nothing more than an enormous dormitory. Some 150 Indian children live at the school but are integrated into the local school system. 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. The village he came from, Ogoki Post on the Martin Falls reservation, didn’t have a day school. He didn’t start school until he was nine. 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.Įven before Charlie ran away he was already running hard just to keep pace with the bewildering white world he had suddenly been thrust into. And perhaps because they are Indians, no one seems to care very much. Sometimes they lose a leg or an arm trying to climb aboard freight trains. They do it all the time, and they lose their toes and their fingers to frostbite. It’s not so unusual that Indian children run away from the residential schools they are sent to. It is even doubtful if his father really understood either. 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. He died trying to walk 400 miles home to his father, who lives and works on an isolated reservation in northern Ontario. And that’s all he had.Ĭharlie Wenjack was an Ojibway Indian attending Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ont. All they got out of his pockets was a little glass jar with a screw top. When they found Charlie he didn’t have any identification. just four-and-a-half feet from the trains that carry the white world by in warm and well-fed comfort. It is the exact spot where on the night of October 22 Charlie collapsed and died from exposure and hunger. In one of the photographs an Ontario Provincial Police sergeant is pointing down at Charlie’s body, where it lies beside the CNR track. His feet, encased in ankle-high leather boots, are oddly turned inward. He is lying on his back and his thin cotton clothing is obviously soaked. 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.
There are five police pictures of Charlie, though.
But if a snap was taken, nobody knows where it is now. We have republished that cover story below in its original form, in which Chanie’s teachers misnamed him Charlie.ĬHARLIE 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. The frontman of the Tragically Hip worked with Toronto illustrator Jeff Lemire on Secret Path, which includes an album, graphic novel and animated film. Gord Downie had explained that this story is the inspiration for his Secret Path project. In 1967, Maclean’s told the tragic tale of Chanie Wenjack, an Indigenous boy who died after running away from his residential school in northern Ontario.
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