The Lonely Death of Chanie Wenjack

On This Day in History: October 23

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.

--On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down: October 23, 1966--

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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