By Alex McCuaig

Orange shirt day

Orange Shirt Day recognized at city schools

Sep 30, 2019 | 4:06 PM

Medicine Hat, AB – What started as a story recalling one of the tragedies of the residential school experience has blossomed into a nationwide reconciliation event with Medicine Hat schools recognizing Orange Shirt Day on Monday.

In 2013, Williams Lake residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad recalled a new orange shirt given to her prior to her first day at the St. Joseph Mission Residential School and how it was taken from her.

Since then, the orange shirt has come to symbolize much more and Orange Shirt Day has been marked by a growing number of institutions across the country with Medicine Hat schools now taking part.

Raevon Gehring, First Nations, Metis and Inuit coordinator with the city’s Catholic school board, says the event helps students learn and understand the residential school experience.

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“It’s a bitter part of Canadian history,” said Gehring. “I think it’s important that students learn about Canadian history and the residential schools.”

Gehring says the event is aimed at giving students an understanding of the hardships experienced by residential students, “and for students to identify with those hardships.”

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation revealed the names of 2,800 children who died in residential schools during a sombre ceremony in Gatineau, Quebec on Monday.

A 50-metre long, blood-red cloth bearing the names of each child and the schools they attended was unfurled and carried through a gathered crowd of Indigenous elders and chiefs, residential-school survivors and others.

Many openly wept.

The list and the ceremony are intended to break the silence over the fates of at least some of the thousands who disappeared during the decades the schools operated.

Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which compiled the list, says it was essential that these names be known.

Elder Dr. Barney Williams, a residential-school survivor and member of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation survivors committee, says today’s ceremony finally brings recognition and honour to cousins, nephews, nieces and school friends who were forgotten.

Year of research was conducted on what happened to the many children who were taken into residential schools and never came out.

Archivists poured over records from governments and churches, which together operated as many as 80 schools across the country over 120 years.

This is the start of meeting one of the 94 calls to action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report issued in 2015, which called for resources to develop and maintain a register of deaths in residential schools.

–With files from the Canadian Press