![]() Lemire uses other colours-warm oranges and yellows, earthy browns and greens-only when Chanie recalls his home and his family. Lemire’s colour pallet gives Chanie’s world a singular starkness, whether the bitter cold of the Canadian north or its institutional analog. The reader understands-feels-Chanie’s desire to escape. As the priests and nuns shear the boys’ hair and submit them to collective showers, the school takes on the contours of a prison. The heads of the priests and nuns who run the school remain outside the panels, so the reader shares the perspective of the children, their eyes downcast. Drawings of the school interior bring out its clinical and institutional nature. The cold that killed Chanie comes off the page. They render the Canadian north as a truly stark, forbidding place. Lemire’s colour pallet is all blues, greys, white, and black-a collection of hues intended to haunt the reader. To understand what he went through, many of us need a good dose of imagination. The result is in effect a language barrier between the reader and Chanie. Trying to embody Chanie’s perspective, Downie sings on the opening track, “And what I’m feeling / Is anyone’s guess.” Even the handful of speech bubbles only depict scenes to convey the message of the speaker. This absence of text makes the reader feel one step further removed from Chanie (who, himself, had little command of English). The lyrics mark the beginning of each new song, and stunning visuals-by Toronto artist Jeff Lemire-bring the songs to life. With the music telling Chanie’s story, the book is almost entirely devoid of text. It is unique because the reader is meant to listen to the accompanying album while looking at the images. The Secret Path graphic novel stands out for a number of reasons. They suffered frostbite and some, such as Chanie, died simply because they wanted to go home.Īrtist Jeff Lemire used almost no text in the graphic novel Secret Path, instead allowing the accompanying album to buoy his powerful images with words. In the course of decades, many children fled the schools in attempts to reunite with their families. By then, some 150,000 aboriginal children across several generations had gone through the system. The government closed the last Canadian residential school in 1996. Churches assisted in the execution of this government policy, and religious figures staffed many of the schools. ![]() The idea was to remove Native children from their family life and forcibly integrate them into Canadian culture by severing the intergenerational connections that allow parents to pass down traditions. Government and religious officers developed the school system in the latter half of the nineteenth century alongside similar institutions in the United States where the objective was to “kill the Indian, and save the man,” as one American official put it. Residential schools represented the Canadian government’s systematic attempt to destroy Indigenous cultures. ![]() Secret Path is a ten-song solo album, a graphic novel, and an animated film that tells the tragic story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Native boy who died of exposure while fleeing an Ontario residential school in 1966. ![]() After a tear-soaked final tour across Canada, the beloved lyricist turned his sights to finishing a multimedia project several years in the making. ![]() In May 2016, Gord Downie, the lead singer of one of Canada’s most popular bands, announced that he was terminally ill with an aggressive brain cancer. It’s a fitting shape from which a rock star tells a story. The graphic novel is the size of a vinyl record album. You don’t make a dent / In indifference / Ya gotta haunt them, haunt them, haunt them - Gord Downie, Secret Path (2016) Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente explores the implications of a new Canadian multimedia project that encourages the country to confront its colonial history with the region’s First Peoples. ![]()
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