Daily Create #1748 Who is your dream team? This dream team is real and is taking Canadians to task for their historic treatment of indigenous people through the residential school programs that worked to remove a culture.
Maybe it’s more of a perfect storm than a dream team, but it certainly is something to make you sit up, take notice and think about what it all means to us as a nation.
Here are the team members:
Chanie Wenjack: The subject of a story that we need to hear. A 12 year old Ojibwe boy who ran away from his residential school in 1966 and tried to walk home… 600 kms away.
Gord Downie: Gord is in a perfect position to give us whatever shit he feels like right now. He is a rock star. He is the Canadian rock star who also happens to be a wonderful poet. He also happens to be dying of brain cancer. Canadians all realize we are soon going to lose one of our greatest treasures so our eyes are on him. He’s releasing The Secret Path, which is likely the last new music we will hear from him and it tells Chanie Wenjack’s story. Gord also used The Tragically Hip’s final show to put the Prime Minister on notice that we need to make things right.
Peter Lemire: Graphic Novelist. The sombre mood of his previous works seem to fit just right to this project. See Essex County for an example. Peter has created a graphic novel and film about Chanie Wenjack to go with Gord Downie’s album. The music and the imagery together draw you in immediately.
Joseph Boyden: A writer who has written his books extensively in indigenous settings, is also releasing a novella, Wenjack, about Chanie, which will bring us deeper into the story.
Canadians: It’s up to us to join the team, bring this story into our collective understanding of who we were, who we are and who we want to be as a nation.
