Beyond the Shirt

 This past week, it was both our Terry Fox walk and National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Thing is, September 30 is also called Orange Shirt Day - which is both poignant and problematic.

The reason it is called Orange Shirt Day is because of the experience of a particular person on her first day at a residential school. Phyllis Webstad was only six years old and initially excited about going to school. She was wearing an orange shirt, a gift from her family, which was taken away immediately from her when she entered the school. That shirt is symbolic of the experience of many Indigenous people at residential schools in Canada. When the magnitude of a tragedy is so large and impacts so many people, it helps to personalize it and focus on an individual's experience so that it can be grasped and understood.

I was very fortunate to have met Phyllis Webstad at OLA SuperConference in 2020. She was so sweet, soft-spoken and gracious. I couldn't help but say how sorry I was that those horrible experiences happened to her. 

Phyllis' experience is something tangible and concrete for young children especially to comprehend. What concerns me lately is the commercialization and corporatization of this idea. When I did a Google search for Orange Shirt Day, the first things that popped up were shopping options.

This isn't what the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is supposed to be about. Some of these vendors aren't even Indigenous. Companies are profiting from this somber event. It isn't just about wearing a t-shirt. Here are some tweets that elaborate on the problem with making it "about the orange t-shirt".

Seeing Minister of Education Lecce doing photo ops in his orange shirt today (when I know full well that the first thing his government did was to cancel the indigenous curriculum writing team) is performative allyship at its finest. https://t.co/8lgc5nWN6W

— Kimiko Shibata 🇨🇦 🦄 (@ESL_fairy) October 1, 2022

Lol pic.twitter.com/u1nbJVfbg9

— tanya tagaq (@tagaq) September 30, 2022

#TenThingsIHate about Reconciliation without Truth Day: https://t.co/cGF1WhRfdb

— 🔥 daanis 🧡 (@gindaanis) September 30, 2022

My lessons this week were an attempt to begin with the joy rather than the tragedy, like Dr. Nicole West-Burns taught her audience back in 2016 and which is also part of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's message in her book, Cultivating Genius. Instead of reading books aloud to classes that focused on the horrors of residential schools (like I did in 2019 and I knew that the classroom teachers would do with their homeroom students this year), I actually re-read "When We Are Kind" by Monique Grey Smith. I also hit upon a way to absorb the core message for the students in my school, many of whom are from one particular culture. After they told me what they knew about Orange Shirt Day (which was mostly about phrases like "Every Child Matters" or "the school took an orange shirt away from a girl"), I asked them if they knew who [or what groups of children] were sent to residential schools. Then we talked about this question: "What does it mean to be Chinese?" (Don't worry - I didn't just focus on students of Chinese background/ethnicity.) They said things like their language, their food, their clothes, their holidays, their music ... and some even said things like "how we act" or "what's important to our family". I was able to say that these are important things in a culture or community, and that residential schools (and actions by the government and other institutions) try to take those important things away or make people feel that those things from a specific community are "bad". I hope that this was a helpful step in grasping the main idea of this particular day. It's not supposed to be all about the shirt.

Speaking about "the shirt", the same is partly true for our Terry Fox day. I have a large number of Terry Fox t-shirts I've bought over the years so I could support the Terry Fox Foundation and raising funds for cancer research. Our school has raised a lot of money over the years for the Terry Fox Foundation, but I think the years with our biggest donations came when we sold the most amount of shirts. This issue is slightly different than the Orange Shirt situation, because at least the shirt sales funds go to cancer research - or at least a good part of it. The page on Canada Helps reports that the Terry Fox Foundation gives 78 cents of every dollar raised to cancer research. It's also quite visually striking to see a large group of people, especially young people, running with matching t-shirts on to commemorate one of the few examples of a "Canadian hero". Still, it's not supposed to be all about the shirt. 

Even though it's hard, let's try to get beyond the shirt.