Gord Downie to release new solo album ‘Secret Path’ dedicated to dead First Nations boy
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Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie is set to release a new solo album just weeks after The Hip’s final show of the Man Machine Poem Tour in hometown Kingston, Ont.
The new album, titled “Secret Path,” is dedicated to a 12-year-old Ojibway boy who died from hunger and exposure trying to escape from a residential school near Kenora, Ont.
READ MORE: Fans gather across Canada to watch Tragically Hip’s last show
“I never knew Chanie, the child his teachers misnamed Charlie, but I will always love him,” wrote Downie in a statement released Friday.
“Chanie haunts me. His story is Canada’s story. This is about Canada. We are not the country we thought we were.”
Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack’s frozen body was found in 1966 along the railroad tracks near Kenora, Ont, a week after he ran away from school.
Downie’s new album – which will be accompanied by a graphic novel and a film – aims to educate Canadians about his story and about residential schools.
Wenjack’s death sparked the first inquest into the treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools, where students were subjected to abuse, neglect and “re-programming” that has since been deemed cultural genocide.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found more than 300 children died and thousands were physically and sexually abused at residential schools. There were 18 residential schools for indigenous children in Ontario alone. The last one didn’t close until 1991.
I did some contruction projects in some fly-in reserves. At night while outside, you can hear some harrowingly howlings like you never heard before.
I asked the residents what pack of animals that was, and they said it was the youths of the tribe getting high on gas.
Every night that happened.
Gord Downie releasing a solo project.
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