Between the two of us, we just felt like if we knew so little, there must be millions more like us. Here’s a guy who’s been touring the country for years, meeting a lot of people…I’m a documentary filmmaker, I’ve been crossing the country telling people’s stories and I knew nothing about it. MD: We were both stunned that we knew so little about something so large. I printed that up, sat down for lunch with Gord, and gave him this article, The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack. There was a very powerful article by Ian Adams in Maclean’s magazine. Jodie had materials on the CBC site, and I started reading about residential schools, about the system, about him. Gord and I were going out to lunch the next day, and by the time I went, I’d gone online. It kind of piqued my interest, and the part that really got me was when she mentioned that was trying to walk home along the tracks and that his home was 600 kilometres away. And while I was listening, I thought, ‘residential school,’ I think I know what it is, but I didn’t know a story about a residential school. Mike Downie: I was driving and on CBC radio was a short documentary by Jodie Porter about this little boy running away from his residential school in 1966. The Collection: How did you first come to learn about Chanie Wenjack? To mark the occasion, The Collection’s Jeremy Finkelstein sat down with the local activist to discuss Secret Path, the Downie Wenjack Fund and his brother’s legacy. This October, for Secret Path Week, Downie will be co-producing a star-studded re-creation of Secret Path Live that’s shaping up to be the cultural event of the season. As a co-founder of the Downie Wenjack Fund, his work provides access to education on the true history of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the history of residential schools, while encouraging reconciliation through programs and special events. Today, Mike Downie continues to keep Gord’s dream alive. This was followed by an animated film, live performances, documentaries, and the founding of the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund, dedicated to cultural understanding and reconciliation. Along with his brother, filmmaker Mike Downie, and the novelist Jeff Lemire, Gord would release Secret Path, an album and graphic novel that reintroduced Canadians to Chanie Wenjack, the 12-year-old Ojibway boy who died of exposure in 1966 after escaping his residential school and attempting to walk 600 kilometres home to Ogoki Post. Though his speech would last less than a minute, it set the stage for a remarkable final chapter that yielded a flurry of creative output before his untimely death 17 months later. Trained our entire lives to hear not a word of…” “…the people up north that we were trained our entire lives to ignore. But it was in between the hits, the tears and the reverence, that frontman Gord Downie took a moment to raise another matter that had been consuming him for years. Few will forget Augas the Tragically Hip broadcast their final concert nationwide from their hometown of Kingston, Ontario.