![]() A recent commission estimated that up to 6,000 children may have died while living in residential schools, and earlier this year a state of emergency was declared in the indigenous community of Attawapiskat after 11 people attempted suicide on the same day one of the cited reasons for the suicide attempts is the lingering, cross-generational trauma of residential schools.ĭownie tells Chanie’s particular version of this story by developing its sense of place. The Canadian government stopped recording the deaths of children in residential schools in 1920, and many of the original records have been lost or destroyed. The students suffered physical and sexual abuse many died from disease, which spread recklessly through the schools. The schools were developed to “take the Indian out of the child” teachers forbid the students from speaking or writing in their native language and educated them exclusively in white culture and Christianity. The first residential schools appeared in Canada in the late 1800s, and the system survived until the mid-1990s children were removed from their families and placed in distant boarding schools administered by local churches and funded by the federal government. The album that Drew and Downie made, Secret Path, is, in Downie’s words, “an attempt to capture the feeling, somehow, of trying to get home.” One day he escaped the school and tried to walk home. ![]() His name was warped into the misnomer “Charlie” by his teachers. “Charlie” is Chanie Wenjack, a boy who, in the 1960s, was separated from his family and placed in the Cecelia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario. ![]()
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