Gord Downie's Secret Path is the most moving thing I heard, watched, or read in 2016. That's saying something in a year that included unforgettable albums from David Bowie, Drive-By Truckers, and Tribe Called Quest, not to mention movies like Barry Jenkins' Moonlight and books like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. What links each of those works is that they carry a political (or, in Bowie's case, existential) punch but draw their power from the specificity of their imagery and the tiniest details that render them at once singular and universal.
Sometimes, it's a historical character and incident, as in the Truckers' "Ramon Casiano," which tells the story of Texan Harlon Carter's rise to the head of the NRA after he killed the Mexican boy who gives the song its name. Sometimes, it's a quotidian object or act that shatters the barriers between art, artist, and audience, like the ramen noodles in Tribe's "We The People" or Chiron timidly pulling the gold fronts off his teeth in the diner in Moonlight. Maybe it's a potent, if mysterious, item like the buttons on Bowie's bandaged eyes in the "Lazarus" video. In fiction, it can be historical specificity, even when it's deployed with ahistorical magical realism, as with Whitehead's railroad.
In Secret Path, it's all of those things, in part because the work exists as an album of songs, a graphic novel, and an animated film. Each one has its own power, but taken together, they create an absolutely riveting and heartbreaking whole. Secret Path is the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy who ran away from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School (where he'd been given the name "Charlie") along with two other students, Ralph and Jackie McDonald. The three boys made it to the McDonalds' uncle, Charles Kelly, 31 miles from the school. But Chanie was homesick, so he eventually took off on his own, trying to follow the Canadian National Railway to his home in Ogoki Post on the Marten Falls First Nation reserve. He didn't know the reserve was 400 miles away, and after 36 hours protected only by a windbreaker in temperatures as low as -21° F, Chanie fell next to the tracks and died of exposure and hunger.
The story, which Downie discovered in a 1967 Macleans story, is heartbreaking enough that it doesn't need artistic embellishment, and part of what makes Secret Path so powerful is the stark simplicity of the words, some of which seem to have been pulled directly from the article. That matter-of-factness of lyric has long been Downie's stock in trade with his band The Tragically Hip, but he's never employed it quite so effectively as he does here. He sings most of the songs from Chanie's perspective, and the music builds tension from simple chord changes and nuanced interplay between guitar, keyboard, and percussion. Occasionally it's harrowing, as on "Haunt Them, Haunt Them, Haunt Them," sometimes it's defiant ("I Will Not Be Struck," "Don't Let This Touch You"), but mostly it's quietly propulsive, evoking the determination, fear, and confusion of a boy trying desperately to make his way home.
The isolation and desolation of the opening song, "The Stranger" (with its gut-wrenching line "you can't see me" calling out the invisibility of indigenous people in colonized lands) sets the stage, followed by the only unequivocally joyful song on the album, "Swing Set." Electric pulses and bleeps give way to an urgent beat as Chanie and the McDonald boys swing and twirl, waiting for the perfect moment to make their escape. In the film and graphic novel, Chanie is the last one to take flight, and the music swears as he looks back, where he "didn't see nobody chasing us/ just my swing dancing in the sun."
"Seven Matches" follows, picking up the story after Chanie leaves the Kellys' cabin. According to the Macleans story, the Kellys ddn't turn Chanie away, but "subtly put Charlie Wenjack out in the cold;" quite simply, the Kellys barely had enough food to take care of their family. Clara Kelly gave Chanie seven matches in a jar, and the "chick-chick-chick" sound of the matches in their jar help Chanie keep his spirits up as he makes his way ("as long as there were six"—and then five, then four—"I'd be fine").
The song contains the most heart-rending lyric on the album; at least it's the one that I can't listen to without bursting into tears: "I know that she didn't mean to hurt my feelings/ But that's what she did." Chanie knows he can't stay with the Kellys; that doesn't make it any less painful. Here Downie is in the realm of speculation, but again the direct and guileless words contain multitudes and evoke pain and suffering and rage far beyond the specifics of the story.
In fact, the only time Downie overtly references anything about stereotypes of First Nations people is equally plainspoken, when he sings in "The Stranger" "That is not my dad/ My dad is not a wild man/ He doesn't even drink/ My dad is not a wild man." Again, the words are heart-rending in their frankness, as are the lines referring to Chanie's jacket in "Secret Path:" "Pale blue/ Doesn't do what they said it'd do/ It's not my jacket/ It's a windbreaker/ It's not my jean jacket/ They call it a windbreaker." Hundreds of years of lies captured in a few words about a windbreaker.
And then there's Downie's voice, which has never been as elastic, as powerful, as vulnerable as it is here. When Downie performed these songs in Canada in November, placards advised "Tonight's show may trigger strong emotions," and that's true of a careful listen to the album, a lingering gaze on Jeff Lemire's beautiful watercolor and ink illustrations in the graphic novel, or a viewing of the film. The imagery is as remarkable as the music; Lemire's illustrations are all blues, white, and black; the only bursts of other colors come when Chanie remembers his home or has visions of his dad. As in the lyrics, the details are striking: Chanie's father laying his hand on his son's chest, an image of a priest showing only his collar and the front of his pants in front of the schoolchildren's bunks, Chanie's eyes, the mystical raven.
Of course, the story of Canada's residential schools is paralleled by the Indian boarding schools in the United States. The Tragically Hip never found much of an audience in the U.S., but they're legendary in Canada. When the band performed what's likely to be their final show (Downie has terminal brain cancer) in Kingston, Ontario, nearly 12 million Canadians watched it on TV or online, and Downie took the opportunity to talk about the injustices "up north." "What's going on up there ain't good," he said. "It may be worse than it's ever been." In the wake of Standing Rock, it's as clear as ever that those injustices continue here in the U.S. as well.
Downie told a reporter that "if this is the last thing I do, then I'm happy." In the documentary that accompanies the film (which you can view below), Chanie Wenjack's sister Pearl says "The Creator chose him, and I'm glad it was Gordie." The Assembly of First nations paid Downie tribute in a beautiful ceremony in December, where he was honored as "the man who walks among the stars."Proceeds from the book and album will be donated to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
