On September 30th, Canada celebrates the Orange Shirt day. Where people all over the country wear orange shirts as a way to honor the Indigenous children that were sent to residential schools.
This was funded by the Canadian government between the 1870´s and the 1990´s. The First Nation´s children were taken from their homes and brought to these schools, where they suffered physical, psychological and sometimes sexual abuse. They were obliged to learn white Canadian culture, religion, languages and forced to forget their own culture. Therefore, the existence of the schools is considered cultural genocide. The kids that managed to make back home, since a lot of the died in the schools, didn’t think they belonged with their families and were embarrassed by their origins since they learned in the schools it was a reason to be embarrassed.
I was choked by the existence of the Residential schools, specially since it was very recent. The lest school closed in the late 90´s. this is such a tragic story and I thought that we were far passed these intolerance cases.
Wearing the shirts is very important because just like me there are millions of people around the world that don’t know about those atrocities so the awareness of this is very important, so we can see how much we still have to improve and to prevent this to ever happen again. Prejudice against Indians and their culture is not a problem exclusive from Canada, for example, here in Brazil we go thorough the same think. So, this campaign of using the shirts can help populations not exclusive from Canada, but all over the world.
Mariana’s blog 