Why We Wear Orange on September 30

In 1973, a six-year-old girl picked out a shiny orange shirt with laces up the front. Her grandmother had bought it for her first day of school, and she was thrilled. The school was St. Joseph Mission residential school in British Columbia, and the shirt was taken from her when she arrived.

That girl is Phyllis Webstad, from the Stswecem'c Xgat'tem First Nation. She kept the story to herself for decades. In 2013, at a commemoration event in Williams Lake, she told it aloud, and it travelled much further than that room. That's how Orange Shirt Day began. The orange shirt stands for what the system tried to strip away from children, and the slogan "Every Child Matters" was chosen to reflect Phyllis's feeling that she didn't matter. Webstad has said, "Everybody has a story," and hers opened the door for many others.

So what were residential schools?

For over 150 years, the Canadian government and churches ran boarding schools meant to assimilate First Nations, Inuit and Métis children. An estimated 150,000 children attended. The last federally run one, Gordon's in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, closed in 1996.

The TRC’s report noted that official records document about 3,200 deaths, and Commission head Murray Sinclair said at least 6,000 children may have died in residential schools.

How a personal story became a national day

The commission's Call to Action 80 asked the federal government to create a statutory holiday to honour survivors and keep the history of these schools in public view. Progress was slow until May 2021, when the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the discovery of what are believed to be the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops residential school site.

Within days, Parliament fast-tracked Bill C-5, which received Royal Assent on June 3, 2021. The first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation followed that September 30.

The date isn't random either. September 30th was chosen because it is the time of year when Indigenous children were historically taken from their homes to attend residential schools.

What you can actually do

Wearing orange is a good start, but it works best as a starting point.

Read something. The TRC's Executive Summary and 94 Calls to Action are free online. If you have kids, Webstad's picture books, like The Orange Shirt Story, are a gentle way into a hard subject.

Be thoughtful about what you buy, too. The Orange Shirt Society runs a licensing program to keep "Every Child Matters" connected to its roots, so it's worth checking where a shirt comes from.

And keep the conversation going after September 30 has passed. Yesterday was the day, but this history doesn't stay in a single date on the calendar. Learn a little more this week than you knew last week, and pass it on to someone else.