Phyllis Webstad wore an orange shirt to residential school. Telling the story helped her heal

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

Phyllis Webstad was six years old when she was forced to leave her home in Secwepemc Nation and attend Saint Joseph Mission Residential School near Williams Lake, B.C.

For the occasion, her grandmother bought her a new orange shirt, but it was taken away when she arrived at the school.

Webstad has been telling the story of her orange shirt for 10 years now, and is the founder of Orange Shirt Day, observed on September 30. 

Since 2021, September 30 has also been known as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. 

Webstad is the author of five books, including her latest, a picture book called Every Child Matters. She's one of 14 members of her family — spread over four generations — to attend residential school.

She spoke to Rosanna Deerchild, host of CBC's Unreserved, about her life before residential school, what it was like to lose that now famous orange shirt and the complex work of healing. 

Here is part of their conversation.

Phyllis, can you take me back to your earliest years before you were sent to residential school? What was life like for you where you lived?

I grew up with my grandmother on the Dog Creek Reserve until I was 10, and we didn't have electricity. We had one tap that brought in cold water.

Granny didn't have a job, per se. And so to make money, she would tan deer hides and moose hides and make buckskin gloves and vests and coats and bead them and sell them at the Dog Creek General store, which is probably how she got the money to pay for our clothes and my new shirt to go to school in.

We lived off the land. Granny had three gardens. We dried fish and meat; canned as well, as much as we could. We had berries from the land. Granny lived to be a little over 100, so it's probably credited to her diet in her early years.

Granny was the youngest of 10. We would meet her siblings down at the Fraser River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver, and in the summer the sockeye salmon come up the river and spawn in the various creeks. And so we would camp — sometimes the entire summer — right by the creek, and we would have fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for dinner. 

So when I did spend that time at residential school, I learned to escape through my spirit and go to where there were happy times. And so the river was one of those happy times and being in Granny's house with her.