Secret Path

Secret Path is a ten song album by Gord Downie with a graphic novel by illustrator Jeff Lemire that tells the story of Chanie "Charlie" Wenjack, a twelve-year-old boy who died in flight from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School fifty years ago. Chanie, misnamed Charlie by his teachers, died on October 22, 1966, walking the railroad tracks trying to escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School to return to his home 400 miles away. He didn't know where it was, nor how to find it, but, like so many kids he tried. Secret Path acknowledges a dark part of Canada's history, the long suppressed mistreatment of Indigenous children and families by the residential school system, with the hope of starting the country on a road to reconciliation.