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.

Chanie “Charlie” Wenjack is the 11-year-old protagonist of Wenjack. Two years before the novella’s plot occurs, Canadian authorities forcibly removed Wenjack from his family and enrolled him in the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, 600 hundred kilometers away from home. After this school’s white teachers subject him to horrific physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, he and two friends—who happen to be brothers—make a spontaneous decision to climb over a fence and escape. The group successfully reaches the home of the brothers’ uncle and aunt, but there is not enough food there to support Wenjack in addition to the rest of the family; thus, the uncle sends Wenjack away on the eve of a terrible winter storm. Both the aunt and the uncle encourage him to return to the school, and the uncle warns him to hurry so that he won’t perish in the cold.

Wenjack sets out alone but cannot face going back to the abusive school. Instead, he follows a set of train tracks in a direction he believes will lead him to his own family.