Today our parish is honouring Orange Shirt Day.
Every year on September 30th, people across Canada wear orange and participate in Orange Shirt Day events to recognize and raise awareness about the history and legacies of the residential school system in Canada. Orange Shirt Day originates from the story of Phyllis Webstad from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation. In 1973, on her first day at St. Joseph’s Residential School in Williams Lake, BC, Phyllis’s shiny new orange shirt was stripped from her, never to be seen again.
40 years later, on September 30th, 2013, Phyllis spoke publicly for the first time about her experience, and thus began the Orange Shirt Day movement.
The Canadian government designated September 30 National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, beginning in 2021. This responds to Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action 80, which states that the federal government will work with Indigenous people to establish a statutory day to “honour Survivors, their families, and communities, and ensure that public commemoration of the history and legacy of residential schools remains a vital component of the reconciliation process”.
-from the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre
As Anglicans in our baptismal vows we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbour as ourself and we promise to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. This is why we honour Orange Shirt Day because in the Indian Residential school system none of this took place.
The survivors of these schools were not seen as children of God, they were not treated with dignity or respect or love. As brothers and sisters in Christ we need to listen to these survivors’ stories, we need to sit with them in their pain only in this way can we truly understand their suffering, only then can we even begin to consider how we might be reconciled to them and to their stories and to the past events of the country that we live in.
We cannot erase the past, we cannot really apologize for the harm done by others, but we cannot ignore it, we cannot wish it away, we cannot turn our backs on the reality of these peoples stories. The repercussions of the cruelty and harm inflicted continues to sift down through generation after generation. There are indigenous people who have never attended a Residential School but who have suffered because parents and grandparents did. Today that is what we have to acknowledge, that is what we have to be aware of, that is what we have to reconcile.
Our prayers go out this week for every child who never returned from an Indian Residential School, every child who was buried without their family there to grieve for them, every child who lies in an unmarked grave as though they could be forgotten, as though their parents and grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings did not mourn their death. We pray for them and for their families and for all survivors of an Indian Residential School. We pray that God will hold them gently in his hand, that they will find comfort, empathy, justice and peace.
