Orange Shirt Day arose from the experience of a 6-year-old orphan named Phyllis Webstad in a hostel in Williams Lake, B.C. In 2018, she published the eponymous book The Orange Shirt Story, which is now in school libraries across Canada. The plot is of a young child in a forbidding-looking residential school losing her shirt to faceless, black-habited Catholic nuns who force her to shower, give her new institutional clothes, crop her hair, and hover over her while she prays at bedtime.
The federal government devotes Orange Shirt Day, or the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation on September 30th, to “Survivors of residential schools” – an allusion to the Holocaust which had 11 million documented murders while Indian residential schools had none. However, Phyllis was not in a residential school, and she was likely supervised in the hostel by lay staff members, some of whom were Indigenous. She has since reminisced fondly about her one year in a public school in Williams Lake.
Orange Shirt Day is more deeply a reminder to Canadians of the supposed “genocidal” nature of residential schools – as was decided by all members of parliament in a vote on October 27, 2022. It also reminds us of the “Two Minutes Hate” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Orwell wrote: “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”
As a teacher, I tried to not join in, but all teachers were given orange shirts and told to wear them. I couldn’t imagine being the only one not wearing orange. I knew what the price would be.
On May 31, 2021 I stood alone against a maddening crowd by saying disease was the principal cause of residential school deaths, as identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was teaching Calculus 12 at a high school in Abbotsford named after the painter Robert Bateman when news broke around the world of the discovery of 215 child bodies in a “mass grave” at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The principal used the Public Address system to ask teachers to stop their regular instruction to navigate this news with the students in our classes. In this context, I spoke about the history of residential schools, the dislocation and despair of prairie First Nations (most residential schools being located in the West), the Indian Act (1876) and its authors’ intentions to support Canada’s marginalized Indigenous communities, the role of the church as teachers and proselytizers, and the reports of abuse and neglect.
As it was a math class, some of the students were uninterested or bored by my history soliloquy, but one girl spoke up to say the schools represented “cultural genocide.” I agreed with her by saying that modern western schooling was mandatory for Indigenous children after 1920, and for a time as many as one-third of these children assimilated into residential schools, another third attended day schools, and the final third received no education at all.
I considered the discussion to be like countless others I had led, with some students engaged and others on their phones or quietly doing equations…until a second student, flush with anger and indignancy, reacted to my comment that children who died tragically while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease. She said the Christian teachers in Kamloops – namely, Oblate priests and brothers as well as nuns from the Catholic order The Sisters of St. Ann – were “murderers who tortured students to death by leaving them out in the snow to die.”
Of course, with this outburst, I didn’t say anything more, fearing conflict, and directed students to return to Calculus. The class was given a break a few minutes later, and unbeknownst to me, one girl left to complain to a counsellor, who wrote on a sticky note to the principal that I had said there was “no intent for murder” and it was “not cultural genocide that killed them.”
Jim McMurtry completed a Master’s degree at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Robert Carney, a leading authority on Indian Residential Schools who documented their positive role in the development of Indigenous communities. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in the Philosophy of Education. As well, Dr. McMurtry has taught for four decades, most recently French Immersion History in Abbotsford, and for a time he was a college lecturer and the Principal of Neuchâtel Junior College in Switzerland.
