People across New Brunswick wore orange shirts on Monday in honour of residential school survivors.
The Orange Shirt Day campaign was inspired by B.C’s Phyllis Webstad, who was sent to a residential school when she was six years old. On her first day, school officials took away an orange shirt her grandmother bought for her.
The orange shirt has become a symbol that every child matters, which was the message given to students at Hillcrest School in Moncton by elder Donna Augustine from Elsipogtog First Nation.
She visited the school on Monday to teach elementary school students about what life was like for Indigenous students in residential schools, like her own father.
“It is to ensure that this never happens again,” Augustine said.
“No child of any race should be taken away and yanked from their mother’s arms and taken away to institutions where they shaved their heads and they were not allowed to hug one another, their first names were not used — they used numbers — and many children died in those places and never came home.”
Augustine said she is on a mission to bring her traditional ways and ceremonies back to her people. But she’d also like to see all students in Canada studying Indigenous culture.
“Native culture should be part of the curriculum and the true history of our people, not like Hollywood movies, like old the John Wayne movies.”
The history of residential schools is dark and troubling, even for 11-year-old Grade 6 student Elizabeth Butland.
WATCH: 2019 Orange Shirt Day commemorates the residential school experience
“The fact that they could not speak in their own language was sad and upsetting and it makes me really upset just to think about how our ancestors acted,” said Butland.
She agreed with Augustine that Indigenous history should be taught to all children.
“We are going to be the future rulers of this country so we need to know that we cannot do that again because it’s wrong,” she said.
Tracy Landry, the First Nation education subject co-ordinator for the Anglophone East School District in Moncton, said her role, along with others like her across the province, is to guide teachers on how to introduce Indigenous studies into the classroom — ”to incorporate different curriculum into different subject areas that is of First Nations content.”
By working with elders and culture keepers like Augustine, Landry said that every school in her district is now incorporating Indigenous history and culture into various subjects, and not just on Orange Shirt Day.
“We have this event day but it is much, much, I would say, more embedded in what is going on in schools.”