Half mast flags, kids in orange shirt.
Did a bit of research on –
Orange Shirt Day.
What is it?
Canada waves flags at half mast on that day, which is the 29th of September, also known as National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. This is done to honour the children who never returned home and also the survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities.
Phyllis Webstad was one of the survivor whose story inspired Orange Shirt Day.
Phyllis Webstad is one of more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children who attended Indian residential schools in Canada between the late 1800s and 1996.
These schools were operated by the Canadian government and church organizations and were part of Canada’s official policy that aimed to eliminate Indigenous people’s languages and cultures and through assimilation, cause them to cease to exist as distinct people.
It is estimated that between four to six thousand children died at residential schools.
Webstad is one of more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children who attended Indian residential schools in Canada between the late 1800s and 1996, she wore the orange shirt on her first day to school and the ill treatment she got on it from the school, inspired the orange shirt day.
Wearing an orange shirt reminds of the impact of residential schools still felt today.
Residential schools are not far in the past; the last one closed in 1996. As Webstad’s story attests, many survivors are still coping with the trauma from their time at the schools, including physical and sexual abuse. The intergenerational impact is still felt through communities.
SubhanAllah! After doing a bit of research, realised how the institutions were used in compelling and enforcing the people into assimilation, and now they “mourn” the oppression, but isn’t it the same thing they are doing in the name of inclusiveness and assimilation when the schools today, just like residential schools of the past, are compelling and enforcing their liberal ideas of gender identity? Isn’t it following the same footprints? Are not residential schools back then synonymous to the public schools now?
Enforcement of the ideas in the name of so called development and inclusion through compulsion is not enacted now?
The half mast flags reminded me the power of the institutions of the state like schools, as how they can murder the children literally and even metaphorically by killing the innocence, their very own identity, fitrah (natural disposition) they are born into.
Hasbunallaahu wa ni’mal Wakeel!