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For our assigned article, see Wenjack (novel).

RATIONALE

After realizing that Canadian Children’s Literature was a very broad topic, beyond the scope of this assignment, we decided on creating a page for Joseph Boyden’s novella Wenjack. While there were existing Wikipedia pages about Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack, the person, and Joseph Boyden, the author, there was no page for Boyden’s textual uptake of the historical person and event. In terms of notability, we were aware of the Wenjack Heritage Moment that Boyden wrote, Boyden’s status as a Scotiabank Giller prize winning Canadian author, the novella as being part of a collaborative effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Wenjack’s death, and the existence of an array of newspaper articles on both the release of the novel and the Boyden controversy. Therefore, we concluded that there was both significant coverage and reliable sources independent of the subject to constitute creating a page about the novella as separate but still linked to the Chanie Wenjack page and the Joseph Boyden page.

 

REFLECTION

One notable aspect of the Wikipedia community that we learned about was the amount of effort and willingness exhibited by the entire community to create, advise and add to new and existing articles. Editors were dedicated to keeping Wikipedia up to par as per Wikipedia’s regulations and gave us advice and proposed changes in order to make our article more accessible (in regards to our original topic of Canadian Children’s Literature). Moreover, we found it interesting that the reputability of references moves on a sliding scale – subjects with history of mainstream scholarship have lots of scholarly articles referenced while subjects that are more contemporary make use of media uptakes. In terms of the article genre itself, we learned that articles on Wikipedia had to be specific and focused on a particular topic with a strong emphasis on linking to other articles that could shed more light on a related topic that could not be discussed in length within the constraints of the given article.

The main exigence we wanted to address had to do with the role that Indigenous stories play within the Canadian literary canon and, in terms of Wenjack, we wanted to separate the book from the controversy surrounding the author which research revealed was seemingly overshadowing the work itself. Ultimately, we feel we were successful in accomplishing our goal of creating a comprehensive Wikipedia page dealing with Wenjack as a literary uptake of a significant event in Canada’s history. The only section we feel was not as successful as we had hoped was the coverage of Indigenous receptions of the text, which despite research, we did not really find due to that the Indigenous perspectives dealt more with the Boyden controversy than the text itself.

Due to Wikipedia’s comprehensive training modules and resources (ex. style manuals and talk pages), we did not feel as if there was anything we wanted to learn that we did not learn. The main constraint was not being able to edit Wikipedia at the same time but we worked around this by drafting the article using Google Docs. In the end, we feel that we worked really well together as a team and, despite initial setbacks, we were able to successfully collaborate in an organized and timely fashion. If we were to do something differently, we would have picked a more focused topic earlier on in the initial stages of the project since we lost research time by switching topics. However, we were still able create a completed page despite Wenjack being overshadowed by the Boyden’s identity controversy and the lack of Indigenous receptions to the novel due to its recent release. Overall, our biggest takeaway was there are more applications to Web 2.0 than just social media. Wikipedia, in particular, surprised us because of its standards of scholarship and its attention to credibility, notability and accuracy which seemed to run contrary to what we were, and are still largely, taught in classes about the validity of using Wikipedia as a source.

BACKUP:

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''This article is about the novella. For the person, see Chanie Wenjack.''

Wenjack is a historical fiction novella based on the story of Chanie Wenjack by Canadian author Joseph Boyden. It was published by Hamish Hamilton of Penguin Books in 2016 and features illustrations by Cree artist Kent Monkman. It was part of a collaborative effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Chanie's death. The book follows Chanie “Charlie” Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy, as he escapes from a Northern Ontario residential school in the futile hopes of returning home to his family and two dogs. It alternates between Chanie’s perspective and the perspectives of Manitous, who take on different animal forms to keep a silent watch on Chanie as he walks on foot to a home he does not know is hundreds of kilometres away.

Plot
The story begins with Chanie describing his experiences of abuse from residential school teachers, who he and his friends (two brothers) call “Fish Bellies” or “Sucker Bellies” for their pale skin. On an October afternoon, Chanie and the two brothers decide to run away. Because of a lung infection, Chanie struggles to keep up with his friends. Eventually the three boys reach a river, where they run into the two brothers’ uncle at his trapline. They are given a meager meal of freshly-caught fish in the cabin where the uncle, his wife, and his daughter are staying. That night, Chanie sleeps on the floor by the wood stove.

In the morning, the uncle tells his wife to send Chanie away, while he takes his two nephews to the trapline to look for food. When Chanie gets up to join them, the uncle tells him that it would be dangerous to have four people in his canoe. The mother sends Chanie on his way with dried moose meat and tells him to turn right at the tracks to head back to the school. The girl gives him a glass jar that holds seven matches. Chanie leaves the cabin, resolved to find his two friends and their uncle. However, when he reunites with them, the uncle tells him he cannot stay and that he must return to the school. He tells Chanie he can beat the impending bad weather if he travels quickly.

At the railroad tracks, Chanie turns in the direction away from the school and toward where he thinks his home will be. When it is dark, he decides to sleep next to a beaver pond, lighting a small fire with the matches given to him by the girl. However, the fire gives him little to no protection against the extremely cold temperatures that night. He ends up dreaming about the sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of one of his teachers. Back on the tracks, Chanie continues to slowly make his way on his journey, weakened from exhaustion and exposure. He falls a number of times before finally succumbing to the cold. After his death, a mother lynx lifts Chanie’s spirit and carries him into the forest, away from the tracks. In the morning an engineer comes across his corpse by the tracks and notifies the authorities. The story ends with Chanie, warm and happy, dancing in the forest with all of the animals featured throughout the novel.

Background
Wenjack was released for the 50th anniversary of Chanie “Charlie” Wenjack’s death as part of a collaborative effort to, as Boyden put it, “put Charlie out into the world”. The book’s release coincided with the release of Canadian Rock musician Gord Downie’s fifth album, Secret Path, a concept album also based on Wenjack’s story along with a graphic novel of the same name by Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire and an animated film produced by CBC Arts. Boyden also contributed two spoken word tracks to A Tribe Called Red’s 2016 album, We Are the Halluci Nation. Prior to the release of the book, Boyden wrote a Heritage Minute and collaborated with Métis filmmaker Terril Calder to produce SNIP, an animated short, based on Wenjack’s story.

This collaborative gesture was initiated by Gord Downie's brother, Mike Downie, who foregrounded an article by Ian Adams published in Maclean’s in 1967 titled “The Lonely Death of Chanie Wenjack”, documenting Chanie's escape from a residential school at the age of 12 and the subsequent discovery of his body by a set of train tracks. Boyden also acknowledged the influence of the ballad “Chanie Wenjack” by the Canadian singer-songwriter Willie Dunn.

On October 22, 2016, imagineNATIVE hosted “A Night for Chanie”, a special multimedia presentation of film, music, and performance related with a reading of the book by Boyden and introductory remarks by Senator Murray Sinclair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The event was dedicated to honouring the memory of Wenjack and all other children of residential schools.

In an interview about the book, Boyden reflected that he “want[ed] us as Canadians to understand the fuller history of our country, to take it upon him or herself to learn beyond what you weren’t taught in school. And the importance of that. It’s not so we feel guilty or bad for what people we never met did, it’s beyond that. It’s how do we come together as a nation and move forward together.”

Reception
Wenjack had moderately positive reception from the mainstream media. John Bemrose of Maclean’s described the book as "spellbinding", and “a novella that deftly suffuses Chanie’s tragedy with traditional Aboriginal beliefs.” Denise Balkissoon of The Globe and Mail described it as “slim but heart-wrenching”. In conjunction with the release of Boyden’s book and Secret Path, Maclean’s put out a call for stories of other runaways from residential schools.

The Brock Press, a student newspaper of Brock University in Ontario, Canada, writes that the novella “is short, but vast in its significance”, claiming that “the book continues to make strides in its telling of Wenjack’s story, pushing for the history of residential schools, the attempts to destroy First Nations cultures and forced assimiliation through violence and hate to be more widely viewed and discussed as a part of Canada’s history.”

Reception to Wenjack was later overshadowed by the controversies around Boyden's geneology and tribal affiliations. Debbie Reese, an Indigenous author and researcher of Native American portrayal in children’s literature, had an overall negative perception of Boyden’s novella. In a series of tweets a few months after the release of Wenjack, she criticizes Boyden’s act as just one of many that “[make] Native ancestry … the centerpiece of who they are”, and the belief that “they can speak/write of things they ought not.” Pieta Woolley, in an article titled “Cultural thieves” for the United Church Observer, mentioned Wenjack as an introduction to labelling Boyden as “the latest alleged offender” in the midst of social questions regarding cultural thievery.