Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Jill Sperling

ORANGE SHIRT DAY

Orange Shirt Day — An inside look at Kamloops’s former residential school

Sep 30, 2019 | 10:21 AM

KAMLOOPS — Since 2013, Orange Shirt Day has served as a reminder of the horrific treatment of Indigenous children forced to leave their family and enroll in residential schools.

These schools stripped the children of their language and culture.

The story of Orange Shirt Day dates back to 1973 when a young girl wore a bright orange shirt to her first day at a residential school in Williams Lake.

The shirt was taken from her and she was given a uniform in its place.

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Today (Sept. 30) the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc held an event to honour residential school survivors.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School was established in 1893 and hundreds of children went to school there until its closure in 1977.

“My mom and all of her siblings, all ten, went to the residential school, my mom’s mom, her dad actually didn’t go, which is quite surprising, I don’t know how that happened,” said TteS Language and Culture Department Manager Ted Gottfriedson. “From my father’s side, my father was a day scholar, so he only went here during the day, but he did get to go home at night.”

Gottfriedson says he was fortunate to have never attended rge school that caused so much pain for so many.

“I was lucky,” he said. “But, when I go through those doors and I see the actual concrete reminders of what my mom and all of our people went through, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes I get overwhelmed and don’t want to be there.”

On Orange Shirt Day, wreaths were laid at the foot of a monument outside the school as a sign of respect for those who had to endure the abuses that often took place inside.

Children were required to speak English and were kept away from their homes and families.

“If you look across the field there, just over there,” Gottfriedson said, pointing, “that’s where their homes would have been and it didn’t matter that their homes were there, it could have been on the other side of the province for how close it was, because they couldn’t leave here.”

The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc has smudged teh building and performed ceremonies to remove the horrors of the past, but they don’t wish to erase the history of this place.

“One of the things that we’re looking at is trying to renovate or restore the fourth floor that we were in earlier back to its original form so that we can have a better understanding and we can see what our kids went through.”

The walls of the building contain some memories too painful for survivors to recount, but it stands today to serve as a reminder of a dark time in Canadian history.