Wenjack

These chapters further explore the theme of Abuse in the Residential School System. The sexual abuse to which Wenjack was subjected is alluded to by the brothers’ uncle: “[S]omeone broke something in him,” he says to his wife, noting that they “don’t have the tools to fix it” (54). Similarly, the boys’ cousin observes that “someone hurt [Wenjack] bad” (55). This abuse distances Wenjack from those around him and causes him to be branded as other. He is not accepted fully anywhere: Not only is he treated as other in the white world of the residential school system, but he is also excluded from the homes of Ojibwe people because of his experiences at the hands of his white abusers. When Wenjack recognizes this painful, twisted reality, he “drops to his knees and begins to cry so hard his shoulders shake” (56). On both a literal and figurative level, Wenjack is shaken by the horrific abuse he endured at the school from which he escaped, as well as the isolation visited upon him by his people because of that abuse. He is doubly othered.

The trauma Wenjack experiences is constantly present in his heart and mind. It colors his experience of everything. For example, when Wenjack hears the slap of the beaver tail, he remembers a happy time trapping a beaver with his father—but he also recalls his teacher slapping him across the face and dragging him by the hair to the room with the skinny stained mattress. This illustrates how even in the forest, where Wenjack feels most connected to his culture and his family, his abuser continues to pursue and torment him. The reader learns of Wenjack’s rape through hauntingly fragmented recollections: “[T]ake off your clothes. I shake,” “he pushes himself against me,” and “he hurts” (72-73). In Wenjack’s nightmares, the feeling of the wet sleet on his body as he sleeps becomes “the sweat of the teacher pounding above” (75). No matter how far away from the school Wenjack gets, he is unable to fully escape the reach of colonial corruption. In this way, his personal violation functions a metaphor for the trauma wrought by colonizers on First Nations peoples at large: There is no way for them to “return” to their home and heritage as it was before colonial invasion.

Wenjack works hard to secretly retain his language—a fact that demonstrates the theme of Resistance and Resilience—but to his distress, he often finds that he has forgotten words: “[W]hat is my word for none?” (43). In this way, Wenjack’s struggle externalizes another theme, the Loss of Indigenous Language and Culture. The brothers’ uncle is distressed by Wenjack’s idiosyncratic admixture of two languages, with “the Ojibwe weaving through the stubborn English” (52). Wenjack’s English is described here as “stubborn” because it intrudes on even his best attempts to speak exclusively in Ojibwe to a fellow Ojibwe speaker. Because he was systematically tortured by an educational system that “motivated” him to learn English by denying him food and water and subjecting him to beatings and humiliation, Wenjack has become reliant on English even in conversations where he doesn’t wish to speak it. The residential school system’s success in destroying Indigenous cultural knowledge and language is shown in Wenjack’s desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to converse easily with the uncle.

Nevertheless, Wenjack continues trying to find a way back to his people, both literally and figuratively. This resilience fuels Wenjack’s conviction that he will once again be reunited with his family: “[M]y nindede and my nimaamaa and my sisters live near the train tracks. I will walk to them so we can be a family again” (46). Wenjack is warned of the approaching weather, but his determination to escape colonial abuse and to rejoin his family drives him to walk in the opposite direction of the school. He relates to the approaching storm not as a harbinger of death but as a source of inspiration, “the smell of it making [him] dream hot summer and playing with [his] two big nimiseyag near the tracks and the big shining water where [they] live. [He] will get home. [He] will” (67). However, Wenjack’s death is again foreshadowed when the forest spirits observe that “Chanie is right in remembering his family lives near the railroad tracks by big shining water, but what he does not fully understand is that home is hundreds of miles away” (78). Through dramatic irony, the text thus offers readers an opportunity to realize that Wenjack’s death is inevitable before Wenjack realizes it himself. His resistance to the colonial system is, in the end, utterly futile in the physical world.

However, his resilience proves victorious on the metaphysical plane. Despite the fragmentation of his cultural and linguistic knowledge, Wenjack remains symbolically and spiritually aligned with the spirits and creatures of the forest. The text illustrates this by repeatedly pointing out how lovingly these beings watch over him. As he leaves the white world and reenters the forest, for example, the spirits begin referring to him as “Chanie,” his given name. By calling him Chanie instead of “Charlie,” the name forced upon him by his white schoolteachers, the spirits show how they will spiritually reunite Wenjack with his true culture and real identity.

The text further suggests that although the spirits do find his imminent death to be tragic, they also see it as a tool to attain this higher purpose. Hence, a gaggle of geese reports that “[they] talk back and forth among [them]selves about how far [they] think the boy can go before his body fails” (80). Simultaneously, a pack of lynx tracks him to ensure that he will not die alone; the mother lynx eventually embraces Wenjack’s spirit and brings him to the afterlife. Despite the residential school’s attempted erasure of his Ojibwe identity and its creation of circumstances that ensure the death of his physical body, the school fails to achieve its ultimate goal: the destruction of the spiritual truths recognized by the Ojibwe people. Indeed, the spirits report that they “watch the boy warm in [their] presence, watch him dance and eat and share his shy smile” (97). Thanks to the intervention of these spirits, death gifts Wenjack freedom from the cold, from his loneliness, and from his nightmarish memories of colonial abuse. Moreover, it provides him with the freedom to be fully Indigenous. The “shy smile” that the spirits see on his face shows how relieved he is to once again be a full participant in his own culture. Ultimately, then, the text suggests that Indigenous peoples’ material defeats at the hands of Euro-Canadian colonizers are impermanent: Indigeneity’s underlying relationship with spirituality will ensure that the wounds inflicted by colonial corruption are healed and replaced with joy. Physical weakness will be transformed into metaphysical strength.