This appeared in my school library around the same time as Gord Downie / Jeff Lemire's Secret Path. It is a novella by Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road, centered around the same subject as Secret Path - Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack's attempted escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario.
I am grateful to my school library, and our lovely school librarian, for all attempts to remain relevant with contemporary literature and social issues. I am also grateful for her genuine knowledge and teaching ability, which annually leaves me with little to attend to for three days, while she educates our grade 10 students on the inquiry process, research sources, and chosen multimedia. As such, I sat in a comfortable chair and read this novella in entire, between brief student questions.
It's so beautiful. It takes on the form of twelve manitous - spirits, neither good nor evil, inhabiting various creatures - who share narration with Chanie, following him on his journey, granting both treachery and comfort. At merely 100 pages in length, pocket-sized, with wide margins and medium-sized text, it is a quick (albeit richly layered and complex) read.
My only criticism is that I wish more credit was given on the cover page to indigenous artist Kent Monkman (whom I have long admired), as I feel that his illustrations are almost as large a contributor to the text as the narrative itself.
This novella, and its large overlaps with Secret Path, left me desiring to investigate commonalities that I didn't at first understand: the matchsticks, the windbreaker, the map, the other boys running. This left me reading a wonderful series of articles that brought a great deal of cohesion to this narrative for me.
Firstly, this interview with Boyden discusses this subject as a secret inter-artist Canadian collaboration to honour the 50th anniversary of Chanie's death this year. At Gord Downie's suggestion, it included himself, Joseph Boyden, Métis filmmaker Terril Calder, and Boyden's contribution to spoken word tracks on a Tribe Called Red's latest album.
Next, I managed to find the actual article from 1967 which inspired the works of Downie, Boyden, and Calder. I was amazed, actually, that something of this nature was written on the topic of residential schools almost 50 years ago. I feel like it's taken this long for the rest of Canada to catch up. This article left me seeking out the author who was daring enough to report. His name is Ian Adams, and he's now 79 years old. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, as a result of his 1967 article and the resultant letters of complaint, he was told that his writing was not a proper fit for Maclean's magazine. He sought out freelance work, eventually transitioning into filmmaking.
I've been posting all these articles for others to read. I've written this blog in hopes that others, still, may. Sometimes I feel like I am just shouting into the wind. I'm sure Adams felt the same.
As so perfectly, hilariously encapsulated in this meme, however, I will keep on keeping on:
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