Wenjack

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.

In this text, Joseph Boyden exposes and explores the myriad ways in which the residential school system neglected, mistreated, and abused untold numbers of children. In his Author’s Note, Boyden refers to the stories of thousands of residential school survivors collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2007-2015). Rather than serving as an accurate biography of Wenjack’s escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, Boyden’s retelling of Wenjack’s story stands as a source of symbolic truths. Wenjack’s inner reflections and the exact nature of his passing are lost to history. Through Boyden’s narrative, though, Wenjack’s suffering and death double as a symbol for the suffering and deaths of countless other Indigenous children, who remain unnamed and unknown.

Throughout Wenjack, white schoolteachers severely beat and punish the boys in their care. This is made clear when Wenjack describes washing the backs of his peers. He notes how there are “long red marks” on one friend’s back and reveals that there are “ever a lot of red marks” on other boys’ backs as well (3). This illustrates that physical violence is an accepted and normalized means of repressing the boys’ culture and controlling their behavior, as opposed to being an aberration in the system’s treatment of students. The extent to which violent practices are “normal” in this abusive system is likewise shown when Wenjack explains that he whispers Ojibwe words to himself rather than saying them aloud. Indeed, when Wenjack hears the slap of the beaver tail, it reminds him of being beaten at school for speaking his native language: “[T]he slap of amik tail is the slap of teacher across my face” (71). Wenjack also recalls that “The Fish Belly who teaches [students] doesn’t let [them] drink any water when [they] answer words wrong. He doesn’t let [them] eat, either” (30). This is an abusive means of motivating students to learn English—a language that many of them would never have been exposed to prior to their arrival at the school. It is telling that the teachers brand Ojibwe as a perpetual “wrong answer,” no matter how or why it is used, on the grounds that it is inferior and “savage.” Their racist attitudes are further illuminated when Wenjack is made to “eat soap” by a teacher who overheard him using Ojibwe words. By forcing boys to literally consume a sanitation product, white teachers make visible their biased conviction that Indigenous languages are a substandard, unsanitary, and profane means of communication.

Yet even this is not the worst of their abuse. Wenjack remembers that he accidentally apologized once in Ojibwe to Fish Belly: “‘Nimaanendam!’ I say but it comes out with my tongue not his. I mean to say I am sorry, I say, and he slaps me again so I fall out of my chair” (71). In response, Fish Belly drags Wenjack by his hair to the basement, locks him in a room, and viciously rapes him. Wenjack recalls the teacher’s instructions during this episode, interspliced with fragments of his own fear and pain: “[T]ake off your clothes. I shake,” “he pushes himself against me,” “he hurts” (72-73). In this way, the text shows the brutal and hypocritical lengths the colonial system would go to try and extinguish Indigeneity and replace it with the supposedly civilized, culturally proper, and morally “clean” language of English.

The boys’ uncle recognizes the extent of Wenjack’s pain and suffering. It scares and intimidates the uncle: “[S]omeone broke something in him” (54). Similarly, the boys’ cousin observes that “someone hurt him bad” (55). Wenjack’s trauma isolates him and causes him to sob alone outside of the uncle and aunt’s home. Through Wenjack’s suffering, Boyden draws the reader’s attention to the ongoing agony experienced by those whom the residential school system sexually, physically, or emotionally abused—and to the devastating intracommunal divisions and intergenerational traumas this abuse continues to cause.