September 30th marks the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day established by the Canadian government in 2021 to honour survivors and those who never returned home from residential schools.
It’s also Orange Shirt Day. In fact, it was Orange Shirt Day before it was anything else.
That’s the message Phyllis Webstad, the creator of Orange Shirt Day, wants Canadians to remember on Sept. 30 each year.
Webstad is a residential school survivor. She was forced to attend St. Joseph’s Mission, an institution near Williams Lake, B.C., at the age of six. Her grandmother gave her a new orange shirt to mark the occasion, but it — along with the rest of her clothing — was taken away as soon as she arrived at residential school.
Phyllis Webstad was six years old in 1973 when she was put in a residential school in British Columbia and stripped of her new orange shirt. (orangeshirtday.org)
She established Orange Shirt Day in 2013, a few months after a residential school commemoration event in Williams Lake, and called on people to wear orange shirts — like the one taken from Webstad.
Fast forward eight years: shortly after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir shared preliminary findings from a survey of the grounds at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, the federal government passed legislation creating a public holiday to commemorate the history and intergenerational effects of residential schools.
But now, Webstad worries Orange Shirt Day has been omitted from the conversation.
“All I ask is that both days be remembered like in posters and media. It’s not one or the other, it’s both,” she said during an interview earlier this month on CBC Radio.
While she advocated for the federal holiday to fall on the same day as Orange Shirt Day, she said she wishes she had asked them to include Orange Shirt Day in the wording of the legislation so that it would always be referenced in literature across the country.
The federal government’s website does acknowledge both and explains the history behind each one.
In an email to CBC, the Department of Canadian Heritage said the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation builds on the work done by Webstad and Orange Shirt Day.
“On September 30, we encourage all Canadians to wear orange to honour the thousands of survivors of residential schools,” the department said.
But Webstad just hopes people will remember the significance of why we wear orange shirts and continue to acknowledge both of these days as time goes on.
“I just want people to remember,” she said.
“In the next 50 or so years, there will be no [residential school] survivors left in Canada. Orange Shirt Day was started by myself as a survivor. And I just don’t want it to be lost.”
LISTEN | Phyllis Webstad explains the history of Orange Shirt Day: