Orange may be in vogue for the fall fashion season, but several students from the School District of Mystery Lake wore this colour this past week for a much more noble purpose.
This is because Sept. 30 marked Orange Shirt Day, an annual tradition dating back to 2013 that encourages Canadians to don the titular colour in order to shine a light on the residential school system and the impact it continues to have on Canada’s Indigenous population.
Since this year’s festivities fell on a weekend, the school district hosted several Orange Shirt Day related events on Sept. 29.
For starters, elder Grant Queskekapow visited Westwood School on Friday morning and told a collection of Grade 8 students how he was dropped off at the Norway House Indian Residential School when he was only six years old.
Even though Queskekapow was transferred to two other residential schools in Dauphin and Portage la Prairie over the next 11 years, his experience was largely the same: he was stripped of his name, given a number and was physically abused whenever he tried to speak Cree or partake in any of his cultural traditions.
“What happens here is you lose your identity. You’re no longer who you are,” Queskekapow told the Grade 8 class. “At this point you’re becoming to be an institutionalized person. You belong to an institution.”
While the 66-year-old Norway House resident said it’s definitely painful to relive these memories, he relishes the opportunity to pass these stories on to the next generation of Canadians.
“I feel thankful that I was allowed to come and speak here at Westwood, because we’re looking at the whole area of truth and reconciliation,” he said. “I think this is where the work of reconciliation really happens, when survivors come out and share their experiences.”
This sentiment was echoed at R.D. Parker Collegiate later that afternoon, when a group of high school students and teachers marched down Thompson Drive in orange t-shirts and arm bands to honour survivors like Queskekapow.
“Right now I’m actually walking for my grandparents,” said Grade 11 student Hunter Beardy, whose relatives also went through the residential school system. “I think it’s good for them to share their stories so that later on the future generations will know what’s going on.”
This march was organized in part by teacher Glenda Moose, who told the Thompson Citizen that the seeds of Orange Shirt Day were planted back in 1973 when a little girl from Stswecem’c Xgat-tem First Nation in B.C attended her first day of residential school.
“Phyllis Webstad started this movement when she was six years old,” said Moose. “She got dressed and she wore her brand new orange shirt to school and then they stripped it off her back.”
Webstad managed to take this bad experience and launch it into a nationwide movement in 2013, a movement that rallies communities under the slogan “Every Child Matters.”
“When we walk we’re walking for those kids that never got to return home,” said Moose, referencing the approximately 6,000 children who died at these residential schools and the countless others who were emotionally scarred from physical and/or sexual abuse.
“They never came back the same,” she said.
It is estimated that 150,000 Indigenous children went through this government sanctioned residential school system, which didn’t completely close down until 1996.
