By the time you read this another Truth and Reconciliation Day will have passed. I guess Orange Shirt Day had too many shreds of residential school guilt attached to it to keep that name. So, a Canadian government bureaucrat came up with a solution – make it positive. Better that than commemorating the sadness of an Indigenous person remembering the special orange shirt taken away from her the day she was likewise stolen from her family, home and community by the residential school system.
The name sounds great when you know government-speak. After all, the truth is out there even if many people don’t know how to find it. There is a bank of testimony and information, but you need to search for it. Go to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (website: nctr.ca), and you can discover a wealth of material. The NCTR was created as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was one of the few things to come out of that commission. Almost all of the calls to action have gone unfulfilled to date.
While many schools across Canada do acknowledge Truth and Reconciliation Day (or week), many do not have resources or even know where the resources are to properly educate kids of different ages and class levels about why we have a Truth and Reconciliation Day.
One thing the school kids have is permission to wear an orange shirt (usually a t-shirt) on Truth and Reconciliation Day. Orange Shirt Day hasn’t really died because of the bureaucratization of the name.
What has happened is unfortunate but not surprising. Jackie Traverse, an Ojibway artist from Winnipeg, got a little surprise when she was online and saw her original artwork being used on sites selling orange shirts for the September 30 event. She never gave anyone permission to use her artwork in this situation.
“They’re stealing from Indigenous artists and profiting off our trauma,” she said. Traverse has attempted to contact the people running the sites but has had no success in getting a response. In most cases they have taken her name off the artwork or put something over it.
She has said that they are using stolen artwork and “they don’t care.” An acquaintance sent “cease and desist” letters to the sites. While some complied, new sites popped up in no time at all. “You just can’t really fight against it,” Traverse said.
In case you think Traverse is only concerned with profiting herself, she has donated to the Wa-Say Healing Centre in Winnipeg. The centre said that when you hear something like this, “it’s disappointing” to know they are being taken advantage of.
This story is just another example of how some truths and some reconciliations have a hell of a long way to go. As Traverse said, “They’re profiting off our trauma.” And that’s the one truth we have seen since the first residential school opened.