Some Williams Lake students helped create a quilt for a residential school survivor and presented it to Orange Shirt Day founder Phyllis Webstad on Wednesday, Nov. 28.
“Maybe the person who gets this quilt will come and visit you to tell you some of their story,” Webstad told the Cataline Elementary School students.
A residential school survivor herself, Webstad attended St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School near Williams Lake for one year when she was six years old.
The quilt project was spearheaded by Grade 1/2 teacher Karyn Sache.
Sache and her mom Margaret Pieti are quilters.
“I was talking with my mom and she was telling me about her quilting guild making these beautiful quilts for residential school survivors and I thought how wonderful could that be to bring that into the school,” Sache said.
She arranged for her mom, and guild members Elaine Watt, Rilla Warwick and Debra Palin, to come to the school to work with the students.
A Grade 5/6 class, taught by Chris Armstrong and vice-principal Tess Riley, also helped with the project.
Webstad told the students so far 50 quilts have been given to residential school survivors in the Williams Lake area and a total of 4,000 across Canada.
“There are about 40,000 survivors so we have a ways to go yet,” she said.
On Sept. 30, the Orange Shirt Day Society handed out the 50 quilts in a ceremony at the Stampede Grounds.
Webstad said that was too many people to give out quilts to at once so now the society wants to give out five at a time so the survivors have an opportunity to share some of their own stories.
Vice-principal Riley said the school is very proud of the students.
“This blanket you made will have a journey and a story of its own,” she told them.
Webstad said when someone receives a quilt, they know somebody cares about them.
“There were not a lot of hugs at residential school,” she said.
One of the students asked what it was like to be at residential school, and Webstad responded she was there for only one year, but that was 300 sleeps away from home.
“It was a long way from home,” she said, adding the food was different than the salmon, moose, dried berries and things from the garden her granny grew that she was used to eating at home.
“I did a lot of crying because I wanted to go home and I missed my family.”
When asked if she was punished at residential school, she said she remembered having to kneel but did not remember for how long or what she had done.
Webstad noted her mother was punished for wetting her bed and had to parade around the dormitory with her wet sheets on her head.
“A lot of my family were there for 10 years so they have way more stories,” she said.
Sache thanked Webstad for being courageous and sharing her stories to let everyone know what life was like in the residential schools.
“You are the generation that will make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Webstad told the students as she thanked them for doing an amazing job on the quilt.
Principal Dwayne Benvin also thanked the teachers and the students for their efforts.
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