Orange Shirt Day Office Staff 2019

“Orange shirt day is a movement that officially began in 2013 but in reality it began in 1973 when six year old Phyllis Webstad entered the S. Joseph Mission Residential School, outside of Williams Lake, BC.  Young Phyllis was wearing a brand new orange shirt for her first day of school – new clothes being a rare and wonderful thing for a First Nation girl growing up in her grandmother’s care – but the Mission Oblates quickly stripped her or her new shirt and replaced it with the school’s institutional uniform.

The date, September 30, was chosen because that was the time of the year the trucks and buses would enter the communities to “collect” the children and deliver them to their harsh new reality of cultural assimilation, mental, sexual and physical abuse, shame and deprivation.

The initiative calls for every Canadian to wear an orange shirt on September 30 in the spirit of healing and reconciliation.”

Quoted from : Indigenous Corporate Training Inc.

For more information check out www.orangeshirtday.org