Each year, as September comes around, churches and communities across Canada pause for Orange Shirt Sunday. We put on our orange shirts, and with those shirts we carry a message: Every child matters.
It is a simple phrase, yet it stands against a history of profound injustice.
Between 1831 and 1996, Canada ran 139 Indian Residential Schools. Their purpose was not education, but assimilation. Their legacy is one of grief, trauma, and lasting harm.
To date, the grounds of only a few of these schools have been searched. Four have been carefully investigated, while another twenty have been examined with ground-penetrating radar. Nearly 4,000 unmarked graves have already been discovered. And there are many more schools still waiting to be searched.
Archbishop Mark MacDonald, the first indigenous Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada, , when speaking in my parish in Kingston, asked the painful question: “Why should a school have a graveyard?” It is a question that pierces the heart, a question that will not and should not go away.
Orange Shirt Sunday calls us to remember this history, but remembrance alone is not enough. Wearing the shirt is a good and necessary gesture, but reconciliation requires more. It requires us to hear the truth, to honour the survivors, to lament the lives lost, and to commit ourselves to change.
Because the injustices did not end when the last residential school closed. Today, many Indigenous communities still do not have access to safe drinking water. Indigenous patients are too often treated with prejudice in our medical system. In courts and legal proceedings across the country, Indigenous people continue to face systemic inequality.
So yes—wear your orange shirt. Wear it proudly, and wear it prayerfully. Let it remind you that every child matters. But let it also be more than a shirt. Let it be a call to action.
- Speak out for the voiceless.
- Work for fair treatment of every child, in every community.
- Stand alongside Indigenous brothers and sisters in their struggle for justice, dignity, and healing.
As people of faith, we know that every person is made in the image of God. Every child is beloved. Every child deserves to be safe, to be valued, and to be treated with respect.
Orange Shirt Sunday is not only about the past — it is about shaping the present and the future, so that never again will a school have a graveyard, and never again will the lives of children be treated as disposable.
Every child matters. And every one of us has a part to play in making that truth a reality.