Wenjack

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapter 7-Author’s Note

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Cemeteries Beside Residential Schools

Content Warning: The source text and this guide depict the sexual violation, traumatization, and abuse of an Ojibwe child by a residential school, as well as scenes of cultural erasure and its resultant physical and emotional distress.

The exposition in Chapter 2 establishes that the “strange schools” are “always built with a cemetery beside them to bury those the attendants knew would not make it to the final grade” (7). To this point, the reader learns that “Charlie had a lung infection. Tuberculosis and similar diseases had taken thousands of Indian children’s lives the last years” (7). In the Author’s Note, Joseph Boyden adds that other children lost their lives from exposure or by accident while trying to escape from these schools’ horrific abuse—just as happened to Wenjack. The presence of cemeteries beside these schools is a reminder of how they caused the deaths of thousands of First Nations children. Moreover, the fact that it was an accepted practice to build school cemeteries shows that the Canadian government not only knew about but also accepted and even supported the beliefs and practices that brought about these children’s demise.

Memory

Memory is a motif throughout the novel, and it connects to the theme of Resilience and Resistance. In the opening line of Chapter 1, Wenjack says to himself, “Gimik-wenden-ina? Do you remember?” (1). He wages a constant war of private resistance against the school’s attempts to erase his grasp of Ojibwe language by whispering words to himself in his native tongue; he focuses especially on the words for his family members. As well as illustrating Wenjack’s grief and homesickness, this practice demonstrates his determination to retain cultural knowledge. However, despite his best efforts, the beatings and other punitive and cruel disciplinary measures inflicted by Fish Belly succeed in eliminating Wenjack’s fluency in Ojibwe; he sometimes fails to remember Ojibwe words. Memory and attempts to remember hence function as literary devices that dramatize the conflicts faced by Wenjack—and, indeed, all First Nations peoples—as they seek to resist forced assimilation and the Loss of Indigenous Language and Culture.

In a broader sense, Boyden urges his readers to collectively remember the trauma and suffering experienced by First Nations communities because of the residential school system, which took the lives of thousands of innocent children and resulted in immeasurable amounts of intergenerational pain and suffering.

Manitous and the Forest

Wenjack’s Manitous function as both characters and a motif. In Ojibwe and other Indigenous traditions, Manitous are spirits animating elements of nature and understood to originate in a single force underpinning the entire world. Wenjack alternates between the first-person narration of its title character and the narration of Manitous inhabiting various creatures—spiders, pike, lynx, etc. This choice contextualizes Wenjack’s story as part of a broader narrative about the Ojibwe, their ancestral land, and the relationship between the two. That the Manitous bear witness to Wenjack’s struggles underscores those struggles’ symbolic significance as representations of a broader Indigenous genocide. At the same time, the Manitous’ presence and interventions in Wenjack’s story underscore that Wenjack’s ties to his heritage remain despite colonial efforts to stamp them out.

Indeed, Wenjack symbolically starts to become one with the forest, its animals, and its spirits the moment he begins trying to return home. Despite the attempts of his residential school to erase his Ojibwe identity, that identity’s persistence is indicated by Wenjack’s enduring identification with the forest and its creatures: “[N]enookaasi, a hummingbird, comes near my head and stares at me […] that is a good sign, I know it” (11-12). These creatures echo Wenjack’s feeling of belonging to and with nature as the Manitou spirits watch over him. His symbolic connection with nature is brought to its fullest fruition when his spirit is retrieved by a Manitou mother lynx following his death: “[S]he [the lynx] reaches her long arms to take him in her paws and then lifts him up and into her embrace” (94). Although Wenjack could not return to his culture in life, the Manitous ensure that he is relieved of his sufferings through reunion with his culture in the afterlife.