Orange Shirt Day (poem)

The last residential school closed in 1994,

the year I was born, twenty three years ago.

Children taken from home and family,

thrown into a place meant to break them,

lone wolves dropped in the Sahara desert.

Once there, they're skinned alive,

stripped of mother tongue, mother's touch,

and forced into a pale shell of conformity.

Native children, still just children,

treated like criminals of identity,

born outside of “Canadian” culture,

one built on extermination and oppression,

the victims treated as wrongdoers for existing,

animals to be broken and tamed.

There is no true reconciliation,

only political apologies and promises,

while indigenous women go missing

and the rights of indigenous people go ignored.

The residential schools may be closed,

but the wounds are far from healing.

-Zero