The Stranger

The poem “The Stranger” by Gord Downie, is about the story of a young child running away from a residential school. This poem represents some of the horrors aboriginal children went through, all having similar yet different experiences of what they went through. Throughout history, Canada is not mentioned in the horrors that has happened in the past but we tend to forget about residential schools and all the mental, physical and emotional abuse children went through for a long time that only closed within about the past 25 years. The torture young children went through during the residential schools has created long lasting affects in aboriginal people today. The harm of these schools is seen to be fully gone after the next 7 generations, which is an estimated 175 years, all from the torture children went through to converse into the “White Canada”.