This is a part of an essay that I wrote in my Language Arts class. It’s about a book called The Secret Path, which is about the residential schools that occurred earlier in Canadian history. Children were taken away from their families at a young age, and if the parents refused, they could face time in jail. These schools were designed to make the Indigenous peoples “white” by forcing out their culture and forbidding them from speaking their language. The kids were subject to multiple types of abuse and harm, given out by the nuns and priests that resided with them.

Upon learning about these tragedies, Gord Downie, lead singer of the Tragically Hip, was shocked, and he soon discovered a story that inspired him to create The Secret Path.  The story was about named Chanie Wenjack, who was a 12-year-old boy that attempted to get back to his home by following a railroad. His home was over 600 km away, and the only equipment that he had was a jar of seven matches. Chanie would eventually pass away due to starvation and environmental causes.

Downie wrote poems about Chanie’s story, and he would create songs about the story from those poems. He later put them in a book that comic artist Jeff Lemire would illustrate. The music and illustrations inspired The Secret Path, an animated film that CBC broadcasted on an hour-long commercial-free television special.

For the assignment, we needed to choose a part of either the book or film and interpret what it means in the form of an essay. The part I chose was when Chanie remembers a happier time with his family, and it shows him returning from a fishing trip and his father smiling warmly at him (above). There, the lyrics “That is not my dad; my dad is not a wild man, doesn’t even drink, my daddy’s not a wild man.” are sung. I interpreted this part as Chanie telling the reader/viewer that First Nations aren’t different from us and that they are people too. He’s asking why they are treated worse than others. The line “My dad is not a wild man” is a reference to what English Settlers would call the Indigenous people, and the “Doesn’t even drink” is Chanie explaining that his dad is a good person and that he is not a “wild man.”

This essay took me an extensive amount of time to do. Numerous amount of times I had to edit it because the words didn’t portray what I wanted. I put a lot of thought into my interpretation, and I think that it turned out decent.  This became one of my favourite pieces that I wrote, with the effort I put into this making it a memorable time writing it. I also ended up getting a great mark on it and received some encouraging feedback as well. The feedback consisted of lots of compliments, but nothing that I should improve, which pleasantly surprised me. While I thought that I did a pretty good job on it, I felt that it could’ve had more detail in some parts, mainly with the reasoning of why I thought that the lyrics could be interpreted that way. Either way, I am extremely pleased with the result of both the essay and my mark. I want to be consistent with my writing so I am further able to write things that I am proud of and can look back on when I am older.