Orange shirts a reminder that even the best residential schools carried a ‘traumatic’ mission

It was in 2013 that Canada’s first-ever Orange Shirt Day was held at schools in Williams Lake and 100 Mile House. Just as students wore pink shirts on Feb. 22 to oppose bullying, on Sept. 30 they wore orange shirts to commemorate the legacy of Indian Residential Schools.

It was the culmination of an effort by local First Nations to bring together the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of the B.C. interior into a better understanding of the seismic destruction that the nearby St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School had wrought on generations of First Nations families.

And it would set events in motion that only eight years later would result in the orange shirt being the nationally recognized symbol of Canada’s newest holiday; Truth and Reconciliation Day.

By the early 2010s, Canadians could be said to hold a general understanding of the worst horrors of the Indian Residential School system: The rampant sexual abuse, the ubiquitous use of corporal punishment, the scores of young children who had been killed in unchecked outbreaks of tuberculosis.

The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released in 2015, pulled no punches on the darkest details: Sick children left to die, unmarked burials, malnutrition.

But Orange Shirt Day was intended to highlight the more subtle traumas that the system imposed on generations of Indigenous youth.

Even the best possible Indian school — one that was well-funded, free of sex offenders and staffed by caring and sympathetic clergy — still had an animating mission of rote assimilation. Young children were to be stripped of their culture and language and indoctrinated into a cold, clinical vision of their proper place in Canadian society.

“The Indian will have to be fitted into our economy, and the sooner we start the better,” was how one Manitoba MP in 1944 explained the philosophy that would define the last decades of the Indian school system.

It was into one of these schools that Phyllis Webstad, a member of the Stswecem’c Xget’tem First Nation, was first enrolled in 1973 at the age of six.

Webstad was the third generation of her family to attend the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School outside Williams Lake, B.C. Her grandmother attended in the 1920s, when the physical discipline at the school was so harsh that a group of nine boys had attempted to kill themselves in a suicide pact. Webstad’s mother would attend in the 1950s, when the school was the subject of national controversy that its students were being starved by administrators.

In 2013, Webstad was part of a steering committee formed to commemorate the grim legacy of the school, which had been torn down in the 1980s.

When asked to relay her experience of residential school before classrooms of Williams Lake students, Webstad said she initially came off as a “disappointment.” “I don’t have the harsh stories that they’re learning about … people dying, people being beat up and people being abused,” she told the Comox Valley Record in 2018.

Unlike her mother and grandmother, Webstad would also be moved to a day school the following year, sparing her from life in the dormitory at St. Joseph’s.

But what Webstad did have was a much more relatable story about the fear and humiliation that Indian Residential Schools imposed on their pupils right from the beginning.

Before her first day at St. Joseph’s, Webstad had been taken to town by her grandmother to pick out a school outfit.

“I chose a bright orange shirt with a shoelace string in the front; it was bright and exciting, just like I felt to be going to school for the first time,” Webstad related in her book Beyond the Orange Shirt Story.

1. Why so many children died at Indian Residential Schools

2. The Canadians who thought residential schools were a good idea

Upon arrival at the imposing St. Joseph’s school building, Webstad was stripped down and herded into a group shower filled with crying fellow pupils. By day’s end, her hair had been cut, she’d been fitted with a uniform and assigned the dormitory bed where she would sleep the next 10 months.

Despite her pleas for the return of the orange shirt, Webstad never saw it again; it was likely destroyed in a St. Joseph’s incinerator.

“This was the beginning of that feeling that I didn’t matter,” wrote Webstad. For decades afterward, she retained an ingrained hatred of the colour orange.

The raw terror felt on the first day of residential school was universal among those who had experienced it. Pupils were stripped of their possessions, herded into institutional surroundings wholly different from anything they had known and in some cases were assigned numbers in lieu of names.

“It was almost like a feeling that I was instantly lost, I was separated, it was sheer frightened panic,” was how Williams Lake businessman Simon Moses described his first day at Kamloops Indian Residential School. Lily Bruce would tell the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that she did not stop crying on her first day at Alberni Residential School, particularly after a staff member told her, “If your mother and dad really cared about you, they wouldn’t have left you here.”

It was on Canada’s first-ever National Truth and Reconciliation Day that Webstad’s aunt, Agness Jack, appeared in a video to describe her first day at St. Joseph’s as being dominated by the feeling that she was going to prison.

Unknown to her at the time was that her father had literally been taken to prison on that same day as he had opposed his daughter going to the school — a violation of the Indian Act. “He wouldn’t have let them take us,” said Jack.