Today's political scene makes Orange Shirt Day more critical than ever: survivor

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Vivian Ketchum hopes to see a huge crowd of people fill the streets of Winnipeg and the Canada Life Centre on Saturday for Orange Shirt Day, because she says in the current political climate in this province, days like Orange Shirt Day are more important than ever.

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Today's political scene makes Orange Shirt Day more critical than ever: survivor Back to video

“We really want for people to come out this year, we want to see numbers,” Ketchum, a residential school survivor said on Friday about several Orange Shirt Day events that will be taking place this weekend in Winnipeg and across the country. “We want to see those numbers to show politicians like Heather Stefanson that we matter.”

Since 2013, Canada has recognized Orange Shirt Day, a day also commonly referred to as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation every year on Sept. 30, and it is a day meant to reflect on the long and often tragic legacy of Canada’s residential school system.

Ketchum was separated from her family and forced to attend the Cecilia Jeffrey Residential School in Northern Ontario starting when she was five years old, and she says she experienced physical and mental abuse at the hands of some of the adults who were working there, including an incident that left her with a broken finger and permanent injuries.

She says because of days like Orange Shirt Day, she is starting to see more and more Canadians grasp the bleak realities of what happened in residential schools and understand why remembering what happened in that system and those schools is so important.

But as the message gets out, Ketchum says she has also seen many try to push back against the message and try to minimize what Indigenous children and families dealt with in the residential school system in the more than a century that the system was up and running.

“People still say to me, ‘get over it, just get over it,’ but I can’t just get over it, because I was abused when I was just a young child, and when that happens it stays with you,” she said.

“I have PTSD, I still wake up at night because of my nightmares, and I know a lot of survivors in the same position, where it’s just always with them.”

But Ketchum says she has also seen Indigenous families suffering in recent years and months because she says the leadership at the provincial level in Manitoba continues to make moves she says are “re-traumatizing.”

She added many have been “traumatized” by recent ads placed in newspapers and on billboards in Winnipeg by the Manitoba PCs touting not searching a landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women believed to have been dumped there by an alleged serial killer as a reason to vote for the PCs and for Heather Stefanson in next week’s provincial election.

“Those families are in a sacred moment in their lives because they are grieving, and to further traumatize them like that it’s very, very sad,” Ketchum said.

“I think that’s just scum-bag politics.”

Ketchum says she will take part in some of the events that will take place on Saturday in Winnipeg, including an Orange Shirt Day Walk that will see survivors, advocates, and families starting around 11 a.m. go from the Oodena Celebration Circle at the Forks to the Canada Life Centre on Portage Avenue, which will host a large Orange Shirt Day Pow Wow that is expected to attract hundreds of dancers, and thousands of spectators.

With events like the ones to commemorate Orange Shirt Days, Ketchum said there is “power in numbers,” and she hopes the sight of crowds on Saturday will help take her mind and the minds of others off of much of the divisive rhetoric she says continues to be aimed at residential school survivors, and at Indigenous people and communities in Manitoba.

“If I see thousands of people I think it’s going to be so encouraging, and I think for that moment it’s going to wipe those images of those awful billboards off my mind, and for me that will so healing.”

— Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.