{"id":23094,"date":"2022-10-05T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T16:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=23094"},"modified":"2022-10-06T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T19:31:14","slug":"victoria-orange-shirt-day-founders-look-ahead-will-continue-to-educate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2022\/10\/05\/victoria-orange-shirt-day-founders-look-ahead-will-continue-to-educate\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria Orange Shirt Day founders look ahead, will continue to educate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Camosun College Indigenous Studies alumnus Eddy Charlie is a residential-school survivor; along with fellow Camosun alumnus Kristin Spray he created Victoria Orange Shirt Day, which allows Charlie to share the tragic stories of his youth in order to educate people. Charlie began this mission after hearing people express irritation and mockery at Indigenous people who keep talking about residential schools. These people say that survivors should simply move on with their lives, but Charlie does not agree. Orange Shirt Day was on September 30, but for Charlie and Spray, the work keeps going.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always hear people say it\u2019s good to forget, and I want to say, hell no, it\u2019s really hard to forget,\u201d he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t need Band-Aid solutions to help our people, we need people to hear our stories and understand that this is what happened to us, this is why we are the way we are, this is why we don\u2019t have any success in our community, because they traumatized us to such a point that change seems so impossible,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cOrange Shirt Day has taken on a very important role for healing in our community. We will never be able to heal from residential-school trauma, but it gives us one small opportunity where we can sit down together in a circle and talk about the trauma that we experienced, and work together to find ways to make a path that is better for children so that they don\u2019t have to carry our trauma anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Camosun College alumni Eddy Charlie and Kristin Spray are the founders of Victoria Orange Shirt Day (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Spray says that residential schools deprived children of the most basic sense of safety because the people who were supposed to take care of them were in fact abusing them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were stories of how teachers, nuns, priests, encouraged children to hurt one another, to reward children for hurting each other,\u201d says Spray. \u201cWhen children needed help and protection from whoever was bothering each other, or bullies, they were turned away from the teacher, because there was no safety or protection because these authority figures were also physically, emotionally, mentally, sexually abusing the children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlie says Indigenous children were systematically crushed by their colonizers, robbed of their identity, and made to believe they were worthless.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were 150,000 children or more that were taken away from their homes forcibly, and sent to these residential schools, and children were starved, denied family visits, physically abused for speaking their own language, for practicing culture,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cThey were continuously called \u2018stupid Indian,\u2019 and that they will never be anything but \u2018stupid Indian,\u2019 and that stayed on our minds, and preyed on our confidence. We never believed that we mattered, or that we could amount to anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlie says the emotional aftermath of this trauma extended far beyond the schools, into Indigenous communities, poisoning them and creating a skewed perception of Indigenous peoples that inadvertently gave surrounding non-Indigenous communities misguided resentment toward them.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany children were in the school for two to 10 years, so if you try to picture the amount of abuse they would have experienced in that time, that\u2019s gonna change them. It made them into perfect hate machines, and what residential school didn\u2019t destroy, those children that they allowed to go back home did the rest of the damage,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cThey brought that anger into their communities and into their houses, and taught people that didn\u2019t go to residential school how to hate, and be angry, and be violent, just like them. To cope with that amount of hate and hostility that they brought home, a lot of them turned to alcohol to try to run away from it, and it became normalized in our community, and non-Indigenous people who witnessed that started to have a new reason to hate us, because they weren\u2019t aware of the root problem.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, Charlie and Spray want to educate those who are unaware of the cause and effect of residential schools in a way that informs and invites dialogue.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur mission is to create conversation in a safe way, in a safe place, so that people can feel comfortable to come to us, to sit down and listen to the stories of residential-school trauma,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cI remember what my grandfather said when I was very young\u2014he said that in our circles there\u2019s room for everyone, and we can all learn from each other. We hope to inspire other people to also find the courage to share their own experience, whether it\u2019s through their own trauma as a residential-school survivor, or the intergenerational effects of residential school. We want them to feel like they can feel safe to ask questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spray says that hearing about the stories of residential-school survivors and their descendants had a massive impact on her life, and redirected her path to focus on educating people and repairing the trauma caused by residential schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo actually hear those stories face to face really changed my life forever, I knew that nothing else really mattered,\u201d says Spray. \u201cI literally stopped what I was doing, and went back to school at 37 to learn, because I was so impacted by hearing. I couldn\u2019t understand how other human beings could do this to innocent children and people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlie says that while this may seem like a residual problem from the past, systemic racism against Indigenous people continues to this day, and it is still creating trauma in those communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, that problem is not getting any better, it\u2019s actually getting worse. Children are being taken away from their homes by untold thousands and placed in foster homes or outright adopted, and those children that are being taken away by ministry will soon outnumber the amount of children who were taken away and sent to residential school,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cWhen they make their way back home, they\u2019re just as violent as the residential-school survivors who came back home, because they were hurt in the foster homes. Some children came back with stories that they were raped while in the care of the ministry, so it\u2019s not ending, and people say, \u2018Forget about it and move on\u2019\u2014no, we can\u2019t, it\u2019s still happening. Same book, same story, they just changed the cover.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Charlie says that bringing this matter into the open is how to create healing, and that Orange Shirt Day, held on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation\u2014which he and Spray were instrumental in creating\u2014is the vehicle by which he hopes to affect change.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kind of impact we\u2019re having is we\u2019re giving people courage to accept and acknowledge this story of residential school is hurting them, and if they don\u2019t start talking about it, they\u2019re always going to be stuck in that real bad place. If we can inspire family members to start speaking, and then come back together, that\u2019s a huge gift to me,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cIf we can touch one heart, encourage one person to change, then we know we\u2019ve done our job, and that\u2019s all that matters. If we can change something, then that\u2019s a positive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Camosun College Indigenous Studies alumnus Eddy Charlie is a residential-school survivor; along with fellow Camosun alumnus Kristin Spray he created Victoria Orange Shirt Day, which allows Charlie to share the tragic stories of his youth in order to educate people. Charlie began this mission after hearing people express irritation and mockery at Indigenous people who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,274],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-october-5-2022"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23094"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23096,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23094\/revisions\/23096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}