Monday is the . In Indian country it’s called Orange Shirt Day because it’s the day that we commemorate the damage done by the boarding school system. Many of our children were taken from their homes and many returned as damaged individuals who fought demons for the rest of their lives, while some never returned.
Those who never returned died of disease and neglect. Their remains are now the object of searches by . My mother came from New Brunswick, and she graduated from the teachers’ college in Fredericton.
She wanted to travel, so she applied for a job at the Anglican residential school at Moose Factory, Ontario. She was accepted and she moved north to the south shore of James Bay. She had a one-year contract and looked forward to her northern adventure.
This was during the early days of the Second World War, and they were very isolated. One family dropped off its three children and went north to their trapline. Over the winter, two of the children died of influenza and were buried in the school graveyard.
In the spring, the parents returned to pick up the remaining child. My mother told me that the sight of the poor parents receiving the bad news, and the heartbreak of the mother, made her commit to never work in a boarding school again. She didn’t renew her contract, and she took a job in La Ronge teaching the children in the village school.
We never went to boarding school. Instead, we went to an integrated town school, which had its own challenges, but we had t.