Home Investigative Report Truth & Reconciliation Day: Orange Shirts, Unmarked Burials, and Canada’s Unfinished Promise

Truth & Reconciliation Day: Orange Shirts, Unmarked Burials, and Canada’s Unfinished Promise

William Burnstick
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Carlos Taylhardat | 3 Narratives News | September 30, 2025

Two Sides. One Story. You Make the Third.

On her first day at St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, six-year-old Phyllis Webstad arrived in a bright orange shirt her grandmother had chosen. By nightfall, it was gone—confiscated, like her language, family, and home. “When I got to the Mission, they stripped me and took away my clothes, including the orange shirt… The colour orange has always reminded me of how my feelings didn’t matter,” Webstad later said. (Save the Children) Years later, her memory became Orange Shirt Day, now woven into Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

“If we move forward without remembering, then we are not the people we should be… Reconciliation is about establishing a relationship of mutual respect.” — Justice Murray Sinclair (Ivey)

This day is not only about what happened in residential schools. It is also about what happened in day schools, during the Sixties Scoop, in Indian hospitals, and what is still happening in the child-welfare system. Indigenous children are 7.7% of kids under 15, but 53.8% of those in foster care—today’s ledger of policies that separated children from family and culture. (Statistics Canada)

What September 30 Means

Created in 2021 to answer Call to Action 80, the federal holiday honours Survivors and the children who never came home. Several jurisdictions, including British Columbia, have made it a statutory holiday. The origin is humble and specific: one child’s shirt, taken on day one, at a school designed to remove children from family and Nation. (Orange Shirt Society)

Editor’s note on a common misquote: The phrase often repeated as Canadian policy—“kill the Indian in the child”—is historically linked to U.S. official Richard Henry Pratt (“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man”). In Canada, the intent was expressed differently but unequivocally. In 1883, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald told Parliament: “When the school is on the reserve the child lives with his parents, who are savages… He is simply a savage who can read and write… the only way [is] central training industrial schools.” (UBC IRSHDC) Works Minister Hector-Louis Langevin added: “In order to educate the children properly, we must separate them from their families… if we want to civilize them, we must do that.” (TRC, They Came for the Children) In 1920, senior official Duncan Campbell Scott said: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem… until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” (Facing History)

Reconciliation, Practised Not Performed

Last year, I stood at a powwow on these unceded Coast Salish lands—the homelands of the səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). An Elder spoke of canoe law. “White men didn’t know how to ask to be welcomed,” he said. “When we canoe to a territory, we stop our canoe, raise our paddles to show no aggression, and wait for the sign to land.” That image has stayed with me. Consent is not a slogan; it is protocol. We were so ignorant to the wisdom, technologies, and education in this land that instead of learning, we went the opposite way. It’s a shame that we didn’t learn from the First Peoples of this land.

We need to grow toward a mutually respectful relationship… There are no shortcuts,” Justice Sinclair told the Senate. (NiCHE) And in the Kamloops announcement that shook the country, Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir said, “We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify… At this time, we have more questions than answers.” (Reuters) In a community release, she added, “Given the size of the school… this confirmed loss affects First Nations communities across British Columbia and beyond.” (TteS Media Release)

Reconciliation is present-tense: jurisdiction and resources in Indigenous hands—child and family services, education, health, housing, and co-ownership in projects. Dr. Cindy Blackstock said: “There’s no excuse for any government at any level using racial discrimination in services to children as a fiscal restraint measure… We don’t want to raise another generation of children who have to recover from their childhoods.” (Maisonneuve) When asked what changed recently, she said public pressure “is getting billions of dollars, for the first time… to keep Indigenous families together, instead of ripping them apart.” (Q&A)

In 2008, Canada finally said the words it should have said generations earlier. “The treatment of children in Indian Residential Schools is a sad chapter in our history… this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm… The Government of Canada sincerely apologizes,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Survivors in the House of Commons. (Apology transcript) More recently, the prime minister reminded Canadians: “Reconciliation is not the responsibility of Indigenous Peoples—it is the responsibility of all of us.” (PM Statement)

Closer to home, Tsleil-Waututh leaders have framed reconciliation as shared work.

“When we pick up the paddle, we hear our Ancestors’ voices… we are always close to them—in ceremony, in the canoe, and on our land and waters.”

That vision is echoed in the Nation’s strategic plan. (TWN) “Reconciliation is about a journey, not the destination,” said Chief Jen Thomas. “For our non-Indigenous neighbours, the work lies in ongoing education.” (North Shore News)

The “Woke” Backlash

Critics of today’s reconciliation practices say much of it has drifted into symbolism, politicized language, and media narratives that outrace the evidence. They argue that land acknowledgments and curriculum rewrites often function as moral display while practical fixes—housing, clean water, mental health, addiction treatment, and on-reserve economic opportunity—lag behind.

As one writer put it: “Land acknowledgments are just words, and words can distract from real issues, in particular the ultimate one, which is… sovereignty.” (The Atlantic)

On the question of unmarked burials, the skeptical camp points to the difference between ground-penetrating radar (which detects soil disturbances) and confirmed human remains. They argue media and governments leaned into the phrase “mass graves” in 2021–22, creating what they call a social panic and a rush to judgment. Historian Jacques Rouillard put it bluntly: “In Kamloops, not one body has been found.” (Fraser Institute)

Journalist Terry Glavin wrote that it was “the year of the graves: how the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves.” (Quillette) Political scientist Tom Flanagan went further, calling it “the worst fake news in Canadian history.”

Even within First Nations leadership, there has been careful distinction. When Cowessess First Nation announced 751 unmarked graves at the Marieval cemetery, Chief Cadmus Delorme emphasized: “We are talking about unmarked graves. We’re not talking about a mass gravesite.” (APTN)

From the skeptics’ vantage, this caution extends to classrooms and public funding. They argue Canada should prioritize measurable outcomes over rhetoric: fewer Indigenous children in foster care, more family reunification and kinship placements, higher graduation rates, and on-reserve infrastructure—rather than performative gestures that, in their view, “let officials feel virtuous while nothing changes.”

“These are sombre declarations… rather like ritual acts of expiatory prayer, recited by rote from a standardized text,” one columnist said of land acknowledgments. (Quillette)

They also point to overstatements in early news coverage as proof that a “rush to believe” replaced rigor. Catholic News Agency summarized in 2022: “No remains unearthed yet from Canada’s residential-school grave sites.”

In short, the second narrative doesn’t deny harm or the brutality many Survivors endured; it questions language, method, and priorities. Its core claim is that reconciliation should be anchored to verifiable facts and hard metrics—not slogans.

“And move forward we shall… We will prevail in our reconciliation because it is right and it is fair.” — Justice Murray Sinclair (Maclean’s)

The Silent Story—Children, Then and Now

The quiet continuity is the child. Then: uniforms, numbers, punishments, unnamed graves. Now: a jurisdictional maze that too often delays or denies basic services—what Dr. Blackstock calls “racial discrimination embedded in public policy for children.” (Transcript) A landmark settlement is now compensating families harmed by discriminatory funding, but as she warns, “We’re still seeing challenges with Canada’s compliance… particularly with Jordan’s Principle.” (APTN)

By the numbers, Indigenous children are roughly 14 times more likely to be in foster care than non-Indigenous peers. (Vanier Institute) Measurable reconciliation means fewer removals, more kinship placements, and well-funded prevention—family by family, Nation by Nation.

Whether You Reconcile or Think It’s “Woke”

If you think this is woke, I thank you for reading this far. If, like me, you’re touched, show up. Learn the name of the Nation whose land you’re on; support community-led searches; ask your municipality and province how they’re acting on TRC Calls to Action. If you run a business, honour Orange Shirt Day. If you’re in government, fund the wrap-around supports that keep children with aunties and grandparents.

And remember the canoe. On these unceded lands, you pause, raise your paddles, and ask to come ashore. Consent isn’t a trend; it’s the oldest law on the coast.


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