Another Truth and Reconciliation Day — what’s changed?

Today is the fourth National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Before it was a federal statutory holiday, Sept. 30 was known as Orange Shirt Day, originated by Secwépemc activist and residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad in 2013. For non-Indigenous people, it’s a day for learning about and reckoning with the ongoing trauma inflicted by the residential school system; for Indigenous people, it’s also a day of mourning. 

On Truth and Reconciliation Day, we remember and honour the children who attended residential schools — many of whom never returned home. Those who did carried profound trauma after being separated from their families, cultures, languages and communities, often enduring physical and sexual abuse. Many of those survivors are still with us; many more are just one or two generations removed. 

The residential school system, which persisted for more than a century, did not operate in isolation. Its effects persist not only in the families whose lives continue to be shaped by its dark legacy, but extend outward like the spiderweb cracks in a pane of glass: disrupting the transmission of hunting skills, displacing Indigenous people from their territories and continuing to impact food security. 

At The Narwhal, we tell stories that illuminate the connections between past and present: between residential schools and the traces they have left on the land and water, but also in the contemporary and vital expressions of colonial force. After all, the abduction of Indigenous children was a tactic, not a goal; the ultimate aim was to seize control of the valuable lands and waters belonging to Indigenous nations. Other tactics were used as well: eroding citizenship through forcible assimilation, as Ojibwe journalist Gabrielle McMann describes in a new explainer on Bill C-38, and banning Indigenous ceremonies and gatherings.

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Many other tactics continue to be used, such as militarized raids against Indigenous land defenders, the obstruction of Indigenous conservation and the politically motivated stoking of resentment toward Indigenous Rights. Progress on the 94 calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has stalled entirely, according to the Yellowhead Institute. In a recent two-week period, six Indigenous people were killed by police, and our people continue to be overrepresented in police-involved deaths. As Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel — who has been at the forefront of the movement for Indigenous sovereignty since 1990, when she was appointed the spokesperson for Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke during the so-called Oka Crisis — told me in a recent conversation, “the government has not changed. They just repackaged colonization.”

On Sept. 30, I’ll hug my sweet, joyful five-year-old daughter and think about my own grandmother being taken to residential school at exactly the same age. But this occasion should not keep us looking backwards; to imagine that the worst of colonization ended with residential schools elides the truth of what is happening on Indigenous homelands today. Reflection is important, but it isn’t action. To honour the 150,000 children who attended residential school, we need to fight for the future and the “faces not yet born,” as Gabriel told me. “We need to learn how to love the Earth again,” she said. “I think we all did at one point, but we need to respect her.” 

On National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, remember this: Indigenous people are still here, despite everything, and we’re still fighting. But we can’t do it alone. The work of reconciliation — the work that belongs to everyone — is building a future that respects Indigenous people and the lands we all share.