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cathiedalziel 's review for:
Wenjack
by Joseph Boyden
5 heart wrenching stars.
This is the (short) story of Chanie Wenjack, a young aboriginal boy that died trying to find his way home after fleeing a Residential School in 1966. Chanie had been forcibly removed from his family in 1964, in the middle of the night, by people who thought they knew what was best for aboriginal children; they did not.
The Indian Residential Schools was presented to Canadians as a way to help aboriginal children out of a life of poverty. All it succeeded in doing was killing more than six thousand children, between the 1870s and 1996; 150,000 plus children were removed from their homes and sent long distances away to unlearn their birth language and forget their culture. As a proud Canadian, did you ever think it meant being a part of a country that actively worked at cultural genocide of it's original population?
This little book packs a huge history. It is peppered with Native Language so that we can keep the language alive. It is built on the pain and loneliness and death of a little boy, and many more like him, who wanted nothing more than to get back to their families and their lifestyle.
In this re-telling, Joseph Boyden weaves Chanie's story through the eyes of twelve different life forms who see him at different stages of his last and only journey home. Some people might say this book is magical realism, but I would venture that it is the full circle of existence, that everything is interconnected and as such nothing we do is left unnoticed or untouched by what else exists in the world we interact with. Our history is embedded in all things and while it may get covered over and buried, it becomes our soil, our thinking, our interactions, our environment. When the wind changes, the soil shifts, and our history re-emerges. We can keep digging more graves and deeper silences and shame or we can say we don't want our country pocked with such disastrous landscape and we can start to repair our environment. Wenjack helps repair.
This is the (short) story of Chanie Wenjack, a young aboriginal boy that died trying to find his way home after fleeing a Residential School in 1966. Chanie had been forcibly removed from his family in 1964, in the middle of the night, by people who thought they knew what was best for aboriginal children; they did not.
The Indian Residential Schools was presented to Canadians as a way to help aboriginal children out of a life of poverty. All it succeeded in doing was killing more than six thousand children, between the 1870s and 1996; 150,000 plus children were removed from their homes and sent long distances away to unlearn their birth language and forget their culture. As a proud Canadian, did you ever think it meant being a part of a country that actively worked at cultural genocide of it's original population?
This little book packs a huge history. It is peppered with Native Language so that we can keep the language alive. It is built on the pain and loneliness and death of a little boy, and many more like him, who wanted nothing more than to get back to their families and their lifestyle.
In this re-telling, Joseph Boyden weaves Chanie's story through the eyes of twelve different life forms who see him at different stages of his last and only journey home. Some people might say this book is magical realism, but I would venture that it is the full circle of existence, that everything is interconnected and as such nothing we do is left unnoticed or untouched by what else exists in the world we interact with. Our history is embedded in all things and while it may get covered over and buried, it becomes our soil, our thinking, our interactions, our environment. When the wind changes, the soil shifts, and our history re-emerges. We can keep digging more graves and deeper silences and shame or we can say we don't want our country pocked with such disastrous landscape and we can start to repair our environment. Wenjack helps repair.