Truth and Reconciliation Week

September 30th, 2021 marked the first National Truth and Reconciliation day to be a federal statutory holiday. This day honours and remembers the Indigenous children who did not survive residential schools, and the survivors who did, along with their families and communities. The entire week leading up to the day was dubbed as ‘Truth and Reconciliation Week’, as the process of healing and reconciliation is not simple enough to be put into just one day. Truth and Reconciliation Day also takes place on the same day as Orange Shirt Day, where we wear orange to honour residential school victims.

Residential Schools

Residential schools in Canada were a government managed network of boarding schools that were meant for Indigenous children to attend. The main goal of these schools were to strip these children of their identities as Indigenous people and assimilate them into Canadian society. They were given new names, forbidden from speaking their native languages or partaking in their culture, and they were taken away from their parents unwillingly. Abuse in these schools were rampant, as many survivors recount experiencing and witnessing sexual, physical, and mental abuse during their time there. The first residential school opened in 1828, and the last closed in 1997.

Why wear orange?

Phyllis Jack Webstad, the creator of Orange Shirt Day, was also a residential school survivor from the Stswecem'c Xgat'tem first nation. She grew up on the Dog Creek reserve with her grandmother. Her grandmother and mother were also residential school survivors. On her first day of residential school, her grandmother took her shopping and bought her a nice new orange shirt for her first day. When she went to the school, she was stripped of all her clothes and they took away her orange shirt and she never wore it again. Since then, the colour orange always reminded her of how her feelings didn’t matter and how no one cared, and how she felt as if she was worth nothing when at residential school. When Webstad told her story of the orange shirt for the first time in 2013 to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Williamsburg, those involved with the event chose to wear orange as a symbol to show the effects of residential school. Through the help of social media, the symbol of orange shirts has become widely known throughout Canada .

What can I do?

Truth and reconciliation cannot occur in just one day or week, but needs to be done in everyday life. Seeking and listening to Indigenous voices and stories, calling out discrimination and inequality when you first see it, reading about the 94 calls to action, and supporting Indigenous people as a whole are very important steps to this process. It is important to seek out information from reliable Indigenous sources and remember that the process of truth and reconciliation is not a quick one, and needs to be done collectively together as a community.