With today being Orange Shirt Day, a Secwepemc student at Valleyview Secondary is raising awareness about residential schools.

Talise Seymour is in grade 11 and did a presentation to a number of classes about her experiences, growing up as an Indigenous person.

“As a child, I hated the colour of my skin. I grew up thinking that because my skin color was brown, there was something wrong with me. I grew up having to deal with the discrimination, the racism and the bullying on a daily basis. And still do.”

Seymour says she was disappointed last year, saying only about six students at Valleyview Secondary wore orange shirts last year, a school with about 1,000 students.

“Orange Shirt Day is supposed to bring awareness of what happened in residential schools. And I feel like it isn’t taken as seriously as Pink Shirt Day but it should be,” Seymour says.

“In the present day, natives from all across Canada are still affected by from this genocide. And we need to understand the awful truth behind residential schools, and how this system, the residential school system, was designed to kill the Indian in the child.”

An estimated 4,600 native children died in residential schools, which were open from the 1870s until 1996.

Orange Shirt Day started in B.C. in 2013, to commemorate residential school survivors and bring attention to the traumas that native children experienced in those schools; where those children were taken after being forcefully removed from their homes.

Teaching about the history of residential schools has not been mandated by the B.C. Ministry of Education.