Canada on Thursday marked its first federal holiday, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Gatekeepers News reports that the day honours victims and survivors of Canada’s residential schools, which sought to forcefully assimilate indigenous children.
The new holiday will match with Orange Shirt Day, an indigenous grassroots-led day of remembrance.
Canadians were urged to mark the occasion by wearing orange, to commemorate the thousands of indigenous children robbed of their culture and freedoms.
Orange was the colour worn by First Nations residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad on her first day; later, her clothing would be taken from her and her hair cut off.
“The colour orange has always reminded me of that and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how I felt like I was worth nothing,” Ms Webstad, the creator of Orange Shirt Day, has said.
“All of us little children were crying and no one cared.”
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while delivering a speech in commemoration of the new holiday, urged all Canadians to take a moment to listen to the stories of residential school survivors.
Gatekeepers News reports that in the 19th and 20th centuries, 140 government and church-backed indigenous boarding schools were operating in Canada and no fewer than 150,000 children were forcibly separated from their families to attend the schools.
The survivors’ families and communities were among 94 calls to action delivered in a landmark 2015 report by the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The over 1,000 unmarked graves discovered during summer renewed the calls for reconciliation.
The bill to create the holiday was approved by Parliament, a few days after the first discovery; an estimated 215 burial sites near the country’s largest residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
Governor-General Mary May Simon, the first indigenous woman in the role, said in a statement that the day would be about “learning from our lived experiences” and “creating the necessary space for us to heal”.
“These are uncomfortable truths, and often hard to accept,” she wrote in a statement. “But the truth also unites us as a nation, brings us together to dispel anger and despair, and embrace justice, harmony and trust instead.”
Public sector workplaces in most parts of Canada were closed on September 30 to honour the day.
