A personal reflection on how growing up across the river from Listuguj shaped The Children Never Came Home, a restrained Lux Arden elegy about residential-school remembrance.
WRITING THE SONG
Some music starts with a melody. Some starts with a phrase you can't quite get out of your head.
The Children Never Came Home started with the weight of those words.
For generations, Indigenous children across Canada were taken away from their families and sent to residential schools. Many eventually returned, carrying experiences that affected them and their families for decades. Others never came home at all.
I wanted to write something about that history, but I was conscious from the beginning that this is not my story to tell as though I experienced it.
It is, however, part of the country I grew up in.
I grew up in Campbellton, New Brunswick.
Across the Restigouche River is Listuguj, a Mi’gmaq community in Gespe’gewa’gi. Growing up, Indigenous people weren't an abstract group I encountered in a history book. Mi’gmaq children went to school with us. They were classmates and part of the community around me.
And yet, like a lot of Canadians of my generation, I grew up knowing remarkably little about residential schools.
That contradiction stays with me.
We could live beside one another, go to the same schools and travel the same roads while knowing so little about something that had profoundly affected Indigenous families.
I don't include that memory to suggest that proximity gave me some special understanding. It didn't.
If anything, it makes me think about how much we could fail to see even when it was very close to us.
I didn't want The Children Never Came Home to become a history lecture set to music.
Statistics matter. Records matter. Dates matter.
But music can sometimes reach a different part of us.
So I kept returning to something much simpler: a child leaving home and never walking back through the door.
A bed left empty.
A parent waiting.
A family wondering.
A name that deserves to be remembered.
Once I began thinking about the music that way, the title became the centre of the piece. The children never came home isn't a metaphor invented for the music. It reflects a phrase now used across Canada, including by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, to remember children who died or disappeared while attending residential schools.
There was no reason to make the language more dramatic than the truth already is.
This was an important part of writing the music.
I didn't want to pretend I could write from the perspective of a residential-school Survivor.
I didn't want to manufacture details simply because they made a lyric more emotional.
And I didn't want anger to overwhelm remembrance.
There is certainly anger in this history. There should also be room for grief, listening and reflection.
For this piece, I wanted the listener to spend a few minutes with the children.
Not with politicians.
Not with arguments.
With the children.
September 30 — the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day — asks Canadians to remember residential-school Survivors, their families and communities, and the children who never returned home.
For me, that means more than knowing that residential schools existed.
It means trying to comprehend what those words actually describe.
Children were separated from their parents and communities. Their languages and cultures were deliberately suppressed. Thousands died while attending the schools, and researchers are still working with communities and historical records to identify children and determine what happened to them.
That work is still continuing.
So this music isn't meant to provide an answer.
It is meant to make space for remembrance.
When I think about growing up beside Listuguj now, I see parts of my own childhood differently.
There were histories around me that I didn't understand.
There were questions I didn't know enough to ask.
Age gives you the opportunity to revisit some of those things — not to rewrite your memories, but to see more of what was always there.
The Children Never Came Home came from that place.
It is one Canadian looking back, learning more than he knew as a child, and trying through music to acknowledge something that should never be forgotten.
The title says almost everything I wanted the piece to say.
They were children.
They should have come home.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Source status applies to the referenced material, not to the original Rhialto song.
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation — Residential School History
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation — Our Mandate
Listuguj Mi’gmaq Government — Listuguj Access to New Brunswick
Listuguj Mi’gmaq Community Plan
The Children Never Came Home is an original Rhialto composition performed as Lux Arden. The historical sources above are references for context; the music does not claim to recreate the lived experience of residential-school Survivors.
