Orange Shirt Day founder fears Sept. 30 being co-opted from survivors

Residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad, founder of Orange Shirt Day, speaks in Vancouver, on Thursday, September 16, 2021. (THE CANADIAN PRESS / Darryl Dyck)

Content warning: This article contains details about residential “schools.” Please read with care for your spirit.

The residential “school” survivor whose story sparked Orange Shirt Day — and the “Every Child Matters” movement — says she is worried the cause is being forgotten.

Phyllis Webstad, founder and CEO of the Orange Shirt Society, told IndigiNews she’s noticed a growing number of public posters and government campaigns are instead focused on the recently adopted National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (NDTR).

In 2013, Orange Shirt Day was born after she shared her childhood story of her new orange shirt — gifted to her by her grandma — being taken from her at age six, on her first day at the St. Joseph’s Mission in the early 1970s.

Orange shirts — often bearing the motto “Every Child Matters” — have become a symbol honouring children who never returned home from residential “schools,” as well as survivors of the colonial institutions.

For 11 years, Sept. 30 has been marked across the country as Orange Shirt Day.

Webstad’s story has contributed to the discourse around the history of colonialism in “Canada” — particularly residential “schools,” where she recalls being “sick, hungry, tired, lonely, bawling my eyeballs out” at age six.

“Four-, five- and six-year-olds should not be comforting each other, and that was the case,” Webstad, of Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation (Canoe Creek Indian Band), told IndigiNews. “I felt like I did not matter.”

‘Not one or the other, it’s both’

In 2021, the Government of Canada officially recognized its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a statutory holiday coinciding with Orange Shirt Day on Sept. 30 — an annual day to reflect on the country’s harmful, ongoing legacy of colonialism.

But despite the federal recognition, Webstad now worries people are forgetting about the purpose of the original annual event on that day. For instance, some posters and campaigns across the country only mention the statutory holiday — leaving out or downplaying Orange Shirt Day almost entirely.

“I don’t want Orange Shirt Day to be forgotten,” the 57-year-old said. “It was started by a survivor. It needs to be respected — I need to be respected — and I don’t feel I have that.”

She said she wishes campaigns around Sept. 30 would honour both Orange Shirt Day and NDTR in their messages.

“It’s not one or the other, it’s both,” she said. “People think that it’s being replaced. Even (the Department of) Canadian Heritage, when they put out their call for proposals for monies for Sept. 30, there was no mention of Orange Shirt Day.” 

‘I don’t want Orange Shirt Day to be, ‘What was that?’’

Canadian Heritage does not mention Orange Shirt Day on its funding program call-out for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, nor on its main homepage — where it highlights the statutory holiday.

But the webpage for the Sept. 30 holiday itself acknowledges both events occur on the same day, stating that Orange Shirt Day is an “Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day.”

A spokesperson for the federal department told IndigiNews the holiday “aligns with and builds on” the work Webstad and her organization have done for more than a decade.

“We encourage all Canadians to wear orange to honour the thousands of Survivors of residential schools,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement Friday. “The orange shirt is a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.”

Asked about why Canadian Heritage did not include Orange Shirt Day in this year’s funding program application, the ministry said it’s “in the process of updating language to reflect Orange Shirt Day” — vowing to make the change before the program’s launch in November.

Webstad’s concerns about Orange Shirt Day being downplayed don’t just apply to the federal government, however.

An Internet search for “Orange Shirt Day” on Google instead brings results displaying “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” first, with only a small thumbnail-sized image of an orange shirt. But a similar search for “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” brings results stating it is “still colloquially known as Orange Shirt Day.” Other major search engines offered similar results favouring the official holiday over the ongoing event’s origins.

“Vancouver” Mayor Ken Sim issued an official city proclamation ahead of the statutory holiday, but nowhere in the page-long document is Orange Shirt Day mentioned. (Sim’s predecessor as mayor, Kennedy Stewart, equally did not reference Orange Shirt Day in his own 2022 proclamation).

Meanwhile, the “B.C.” government’s webpage for the NDTR statutory holiday encourages people to participate by “wearing an orange shirt,” but only mentions the occasion’s origins as Orange Shirt Day after eight paragraphs, nearly halfway down the text.

“2024 marks the eleventh anniversary of Orange Shirt Day,” the province notes, “an important opportunity to open up dialogue on anti-racism and anti-bullying.”

For Webstad, as a survivor, the trend is becoming increasingly worrisome.

“One day, there will be no survivors left in Canada,” Webstad said. “I don’t want Orange Shirt Day to be, ‘What was that?’”

She said she originally chose late September for Orange Shirt Day because it’s the time of year when “Canada” took hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and families — starting in the 1880s until the last residential “school” closed in the late 1990s.

The early fall date also lets teachers plan lessons about residential “schools” after settling into each new school year, she explained.

“September made sense,” Webstad said, “because survivors do not like this time of the year.”

‘They just look at it as a money-maker’

In 2015, she founded the Orange Shirt Society as a non-profit, trademarking the phrase “Every Child Matters.”

The organization sells orange t-shirts and other merchandise, with funds and donations going towards its growing public awareness campaigns.

“Survivors are adults, Elders now,” she said. “But they were children when they were at these so-called ‘schools’ — they matter.”

And the slogan “Every Child Matters” also honoured the students “who didn’t come home, the missing children and unmarked burials,” she said. “They matter.”

Before Parliamentarians passed Bill C-369 — establishing National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as a statutory holiday — Webstad said the government had debated instead picking June 21, National Indigenous Peoples Day, as a new statutory holiday.

But Sept. 30 was later proposed instead, and that’s when Webstad got involved, testifying about a potential Sept. 30 official date — which was ultimately picked because “because Sept. 30 is somber, it’s not celebratory,” she recalled.

“Orange Shirt Day is like Remembrance Day — you wouldn’t say, ‘I’m going to celebrate Remembrance Day,’ or ‘Happy Remembrance Day,’” she added. “Genocide is nothing to be happy about.”

Another ongoing concern for Webstad and others in the Orange Shirt Society is what they describe as the appropriation of their cause by merchandisers around the world.

She described seeing Orange Shirt Day and “Every Child Matters” items for sale on popular online shops such as Etsy or Redbubble, from countries as far away as Vietnam.

One survivor contacted her upset to have found online vendors selling their own versions of orange shirts with a “fashionable” spin.

“She said, ‘My 10-year experience being held captive there was anything but fashionable,’” Webstad recalled. “They just look at it as a money-maker. They don’t understand the history behind it; they see it as trending and popular.”

But the Orange Shirt Society has entered official partnerships with some major chains such as Walmart and Tim Hortons to sell merchandise honouring Orange Shirt Day.

So Webstad is aware of some people’s criticisms that the cause has become co-opted by companies.

“I know a lot of people get upset — they say it’s commercialized,” she said. “But it’s either that, or (the Orange Shirt Society) folds.”

‘Refusing reconciliation … framed by the State’

Since the federal holiday was declared, several Indigenous scholars have shared their thoughts about government moves to memorialize colonialism’s harms.

In an Orange Shirt Day lecture the first year Sept. 30 was also a statutory holiday, Yellowhead Institute research fellow Brock Pitawanakwat said it’s important to honour residential “school” survivors without ignoring current examples of colonialism.

“I can certainly see the importance of … trying to make sure that legacy isn’t lost,” the Anishinaabe scholar from Whitefish River First Nation told an audience hosted by the Indigenous Environmental Justice Project in 2021.

But he warned “Canadians” not to focus solely on events of the past.

“Having a holiday to commemorate residential schools, it’s easier for Canadians — and the Canadian government who were in the position to create the national holiday or make it official — to apologize for things that are behind us historically.”

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson — Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author of As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance — said in a 2022 lecture that Indigenous movements’ priorities should be paramount, not governments’.

“Within Indigenous movements and within Indigenous communities, looking at ways in Canada of organizing that were based on what communities, Elders and Indigenous folks thought were important — not what the State was telling us we needed to do,” Simpson told the Oregon Humanities Centre in 2022, adding there is “a way of refusing reconciliation and the way that was being framed by the State.”

Pitawanakwat, co-ordinator of York University’s Indigenous Studies Program, noted there’s no “Indigenous Impoverishment Day” or “Indigenous Land Theft Day” or one for child “welfare” — even though those issues are ongoing colonial traumas.

“It almost seems like an opportunity for colonizers to give themselves a pat on the back for caring about the consequences of what they did,” he said, “without actually having to do any redress.”

‘The seed has been planted with these kids’

Looking toward the future of the Indigenous-led Orange Shirt Day campaign, Webstad said her non-profit is planning ahead two years to honour the first cohort of children to graduate after receiving Orange Shirt Day education all the way from kindergarten through Grade 12.

“People my age didn’t learn what happened to us,” she said. “They didn’t learn residential ‘school’ history in school.

“I want the world to know, and Canada to know, that this graduating class is coming out, they’ve learned about what happened to us, and they have empathy.”

She believes these future leaders, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, will create a different world than the one she grew up in — where she “wasn’t even treated like a human being.”

“I’ll never see reconciliation in my lifetime,” she said. “But we’re on the path. The seed has been planted with these kids in school.”