The grassroots movement to remember residential school system survivors and those who never returned to their families, Orange Shirt Day, started on the West Coast and quickly went “viral,” to use the vernacular of today.
Canadians recognize Orange Shirt Day by wearing orange T-shirts on September 30 and that date was selected by the federal government as National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, now a statuatory federal holiday, and which is now “celebrated” in the nation’s capital and in several provincial capitals across the nation. Not all provinces have designated the day as a statutory provincial holiday, although a number have made it a holiday for non-essential government workers; we shall gently call that “a work in progress.”
It is incomprehensible that anyone in this nation, at least anyone who has not been living off the grid in a remote cave, does not know that Orange Shirt Day is a day to recognize the impact of the residential school system on Canada’s Indigenous population. The impact of removing children from their families, punishing them for speaking their own languages or practicing their culture, forcing them to adopt the dominant religious practices of the time, and in general attempting to “kill the Indian in the child” to quote one of the most infamous policy statements of the time, still reverberates to the present day. The term “genocide” has been bandied about, sometimes “qualified” with the prefix “cultural,” but the unvarnished definition of that word fits and we, as a nation must learn to wear it. When Pope Francis visited Canada last July, specifically several First Nation communities, he was moved to declare on his flight back to Rome that what he had learned and observed was “cultural genocide.”
Generational trauma, where children grow up in families parented by mothers and fathers who were themselves bereft of the benefit of learning how to be parents from their own parents—instead being raised by people struggling with their own challenges, continues to bedevil Indigenous families and communities.
We must honour those who came through that system with characters tempered by the fire and who went on to accomplish great things (think the late Dr. Cecil King, Joe Hare baa or the very much still with us Grace Fox, as examples), but we should recognize that so many less redoubtable of spirit came away damaged, sometimes beyond repair or recompense.
The residential school system is now in our past, but not in so distant a past that we can claim it as simply an historical wrong. The final residential school closure took place in 1996 and the last day school closed in 2000. The lesser known Indian Day Schools did not remove children from their families or communities but followed the same assimilation program as the residential school system haad.
As our nation attempts to make reparations for the residential school and day school systems and take some of the steps called for in the TRC Calls to Action to attempt to reverse the harms inflicted on survivors of those systems, the orange shirts stand as a visible reminder of what has passed, what remains with us today, and how we must never allow such atrocities to occur again under our watch. We can and must be better than that.
The world seems to be slipping backwards. With attacks on Jewish synagogues and gravesites, denialism and misinformation about the Holocaust rising, and inhumane reactions to the wave of refugees, both economic and those fleeing war and pestilence, rife across the globe, those orange shirts loudly cry out—never again.
