A WE Day call to action
Singer Gord Downie, family of late aboriginal teen give lesson on residential schools
A stadium filled with thousands of students just heard the story of Chanie Wenjack.
When the 12-year-old boy fled Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in the 1960s, he never made it home. This weekend will be the 50th anniversary of his death.
On Wednesday, Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie and his brother Mike stood on stage at WE Day event in Toronto with Wenjack’s big sister Pearl and her son in an effort to be sure kids in Canada knew about what happened to him.
A call to action from Mike Downie and a prayer from Pearl came as a powerful encore to his brother’s performance of “The Stranger,” a song from his newly released solo project, Secret Path, which is inspired by Wenjack’s story.
Mike Downie noted that there are a lot of others like his.
“Talk about it. Talk about residential schools. Talk about what each of us can do in the name of reconciliation and then let’s get to work,” Mike Downie said to the crowd of teens and preteens.
During his performance, Gord Downie walked to the front of the stage, struggling forward before slowly crumbling to the ground — a powerful visual of a difficult journey.
Downie is experiencing a difficult journey of his own. This year, he announced he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
Some of the thousands of students in the crowd at the Air Canada Centre Wednesday said they were struck by Downie’s performance because it made them aware of a part of Canadian history they hadn’t ever heard about.
Sidra Saeed and Rosa Riad, both in Grade 11, came to the event as volunteers: Neither knew about the scope of Canada’s residential schools — where 150,000 First Nations children were pulled from their families to be stripped of their culture — before it was brought to their attention on Wednesday.
“I had absolutely no idea,” Saeed said. “But now I’m going to keep an eye on it and see how I can help.”
She said she was surprised to find out how many people had been affected and that the impact is still felt by many today.
Namrah Asghar, 16, first decided to check out Downie’s music this summer when the national Olympic broadcast veered to the final Tragically Hip show in Kingston.
“His (music) was downright poetry. And you could feel it, especially when you are seeing it live with those images,” she said.
Asghar said she teared up when Downie went to the floor on stage during his performance Wednesday, thinking about her own little sister — trying to imagine what it would feel like if she ever found her way into a situation like Chanie’s.
“To actually see people who have actually gone through those times and learn that it was a really bad time for people in Canada and it shouldn’t have happened at all,” said Shehzeen Daruwala, 16, who said she learned about residential schools in her history class.
Grade 8 student Jacob Dobson said he had watched the live-stream of the Hip’s last show in Kingston, but wasn’t expecting to ever get a chance to see him play again.