Chantal:
Fucking racist pricks with their oppressive hateful religion.
The Lonely Death of Chanie Wenjack, On This Day in History: October 23 by James Fell, Oct 23, 2025, Sweary History with James Fell
When I was a boy my father would pick me up at the Prince George Airport in British Columbia and drive us to his home south of Burns Lake. Along the three-hour drive we’d pass an ominous building on Fraser Lake called the Lejac Residential School. It was a place where the Canadian government sent Indigenous children to “kill the Indian in the child.” But sometimes they just plain old killed the child. Either way, it was a literal ethnic cleansing.
Canada’s Indian Residential School System began in 1874 and was comprised of 130 schools across the nation. They were run by Christian churches and took Indigenous children from their families in order to assimilate them into white culture. Over the network’s existence, approximately a third of all Indigenous children in Canada were placed in such schools. The schools were rampant with physical and sexual abuse, as well as death.
Several thousand children died over the years. Notable for the Lejac school was when four boys, eight and nine years old, ran away on New Year’s Day, 1937. Dressed in only light clothing against the Canadian winter cold, they made it six of the seven miles back to their home before they froze to death.
Chanie Wenjack was another boy who died fleeing a residential school. He was a twelve-year-old Ojibwe child who fled the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Ontario where he had been forced to live for three years. He intended to walk back to his home on the Marten Falls Reserve, almost four hundred miles away.
He had been sent to the school with his two sisters; the administrators changed his named to “Charlie.” On October 16, 1966, he and two friends fled the school. They made it twenty miles to his uncle’s place, where they stayed for four days. Chanie then left on his own, lightly dressed, following the railroad to make his way home. He made it another dozen miles before he collapsed and died from hunger and exposure on October 23.
A coroner’s inquest the following month stated, “The Indian education system causes tremendous emotional and adjustment problems for these children.” No shit. In February of 1967 Maclean’s magazine published an article with the misnaming title “The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack.” It brought the tragedy of Canada’s residential school system to national attention.
But it would be another three decades before the last residential school would close in Canada.
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Cathy McCarthy:
The residential school system was a crime against humanity that will forever be a stain on Canadian history!
Heather Blacha:
Fucking heartbreaking. If course this wasn’t taught in public schools.
Shantell Powell:
I didn’t know my Dad had gone to one until two years ago. He hid that for over fifty years.
Kay Mills-Eby:
People act like residential schools were a thing a long long time ago, but the last one closed only 29 years ago in 1996. The generational trauma is still blatantly obvious today, and the racism is still there, hidden behind stereotypes instead of schools. And of course, we can’t forget the part the RCMP played in this genocide, another fact people like to overlook.
2018: “The Scoop” by Kent Monkman
Kathlyn:
Feels wrong clicking the heart on this. I appreciate the article, and the information, but can’t like the subject in any way. Thank goodness this travesty is over (along with many similar other colonial schemes around the world), and I hope that equality happens for indigenous peoples everywhere someday.
Shantell Powell:
It’s not over. It changed modes. Birth alerts are ongoing. Social workers swoop in to steal babies. Instead of being put into residential “schools,” they’re put into for-profit group homes. Girls as young as 9 are fitted with IUDs because it’s assumed they will be sexually assaulted, and this will prevent pregnancies. The girls are not given medical aftercare for the procedure. By the time the kids age out of the system, they know next to nothing about their culture. Many end up on the streets or in prisons. The system is still working as originally intended. It’s killing the Indian in the child.
And the stupid selfish greedy human species continues its despicable supremacist journey destroying earth’s livability.
Jedi Senshi:
Gord Downie lead singer of the Tragically Hip collaborated with Chanie’s family on an project including a ten-song music album, a graphic novel, an animated television film, and instructional materials. I believe that money from those projects goes into the Downie-Wenjack Fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanie_Wenjack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Path
https://downiewenjack.ca/our-work/
Paul Riggs:
The residential “schools” for indigenous children are a shame shared on both sides of the 48th parallel. How does a nation make up for cultural and literal genocide? “Oops. Sorry” seems inadequate.At the very least, stop the raping, thieving, polluting and murdering, and stop dumping bodies in landfills with “christian” con politicos refusing to search for the bodies.
Refer also to:
2022: We must reconcile by doing, not with endless empty promises and big lies. And we must punt all racist judges (and stop putting them on the bench). And society must punt all racist politicians, far too many of them, including Pierre Poilievre and fraudster Zionist Mark Carney, and the idiots in the vile orange Nazi ultra religious kid-raping regime busy destroying the USA.