Residential school system remembered on Orange Shirt Day
Posted September 30, 2016 12:52 pm.
Last Updated September 30, 2016 1:06 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Toronto school is raising money and awareness for a Cree school on Orange Shirt Day.
Orange Shirt Day is meant to raise awareness about Canada’s shameful history of residential schools.
It was created by a then-six-year-old B.C. girl who dressed up in a new orange shirt on her first day of residential school, but was quickly made to wear the institutional uniform.
Phyllis Webstad of Williams Lake said she never saw her specially-chosen shirt again, and the experience made her feel worthless and insignificant. She organized the first Orange Shirt Day on Sept. 30, 2013
This year, at Toronto’s Downsview Secondary School, students and staff are raising funds for their sister school, Mikisew School in Pimicikamak Cree Nation/Cross Lake Manitoba. They hope to raise $6,000, which will be used to purchase a 3D printer and 300 books for the new library.
In Thunder Bay, First Nation leaders and local officials plan to gather for a “walk for healing.” Participants will walk from city hall to the former site of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, where a traditional ceremony and blessing will be held.
For more than 100 years, the federal government funded church-run schools where more than 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children were placed, often against their parents’ wishes.
