Image: Orange Shirt Day, 2018, Richard Bott

When I wear an orange shirt,
that can’t be all that I do –
I need to understand what happened
when Phyllis Webstad
went to the Mission school
and her new orange shirt was taken away;

when I listen to Phyllis’s story,
that can’t be all that I do –
I need to learn more about
Canada’s Residential Institutions,
where her mother and grandmother
and thousands upon thousands
of Indigenous children
had been taken, away from their families,
forced to learn white words and white culture,
and kept from speaking and learning their own,
and about the abuse, and the trauma,
and the children who died
at the Residential Institutions,
and what happened to the Survivors
and their children, and communities,
and on;

if I learn about the Truth told by survivors
of the cultural genocide,
that can’t be all I do;
I need to learn how the racism
and systemic oppression
that built the Residential Institutions
continues on in so many ways
in Canada’s social, judicial, legislative,
education, policing… and theological
institutions –
and how that continues
the broken promises, the broken treaties,
the broken relationships,
the stolen resources,
the missing and murdered Indigenous
women and girls and two spirit people;

and if I’m going to learn
about all of these things,
it can’t be all that I do.

Listening and learning
can’t be all that I do.

I need to act.

I need to hold Canada’s leaders,
federal, provincial, municipal,
in places of learning, in places of faith,
and places of economics,
in all the places where decisions get made,
to account.

I need to demand that they act
on the Calls to Action and the
Calls to Justice and the
calls from Indigenous communities
to work *with* rather than steamroll *over*.

And if I’m going to call others to change,
to the work of starting again,
in a good way,
to the work of right relations
between Settler-descendants
and Indigenous peoples –
it can’t be all that I do.

I need to change me, too.

There is *always* a next step.

I hope that I’ll take it.

Because I’ll be putting on my orange shirt…

~ posted on Moderator Richard Bott’s Facebook page on September 27, 2021