An Ojibwe boy runs away from a North Ontario Indian School, not realizing just how far away home is. Along the way he's followed by Manitous, spirits of the forest who comment on his plight, cajoling, taunting, and ultimately offering him a type of comfort on his difficult journey back to the place he was so brutally removed from.

The boy’s name was Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Ojibwe boy who was found dead beside that lonely stretch of railroad tracks 50 years ago, on Oct. 22, 1966.
He’d run away from Cecelia Jeffreys Industrial Indian School a number of days before, on Oct. 16, a Sunday, with two friends who were brothers. None of them had planned this escape on that unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, scrambling over a chain link fence and then following a secret path so many of the schoolchildren had used before to skirt around the town of Kenora and into the bush in their attempts to just get home.
All to this point had returned voluntarily or had been caught, but Chanie and the two brothers were especially driven.