Orange Shirt Day 2025 Activity

Photos detailing more information about the activity below…

“It’s been over a decade since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its 94 Calls to Action. And yet—many of those calls are still waiting to be answered.

• 17 not yet started
• 29 still at the proposal stage
• 33 in progress
• Only 15 completed

The gap is not just in policy—it’s in presence. In memory. In relationship.
We’ve seen how this day can become a checkbox. A gesture. A school assembly or a social post. But maybe—it’s asking to become something more.

What if reconciliation is not only about what we do…
but also about how we remember?
How we relate?
How we allow grief, care, and complexity to touch us—not as performance, but as practice?

This week, alongside a team of parents and educators, students at King George Public School in Guelph, ON created over 500 orange hearts. Each one decorated by hand to honour a child who never came home from a residential school. Each one a small act of remembrance, made visible.

This art-based activism is not enough—because nothing will bring back the thousands of Indigenous children who were taken from their families, their languages, their lands, their joy.

But it can still be something:

• A beginning
• A continuance
• A deepening

It is our hope that these hearts ripple outward—into homes, into conversations, into commitments. Because this is not history. It is now. The intergenerational wounds remain, the oppression continues…and so must our remembering and resistance.

As we turn with the rhythms of fall:
What stirs in your heart this Orange Shirt Day?
What will you carry forward?

We offer this post, this activity, these prompts, as a small act of public remembering—and as a reminder that land justice, climate justice, and justice for Indigenous children are inseparable.

As an org for planet and people, we know that the wounds of colonization are not separate from the wounds of land. Environmental harm has always been entangled with the erasure of Indigenous children, languages, and ways of life.

May every child be held in joy, in language, in love.
May every heart be a seed of return
May we learn to walk gently — and never forget.”

– Sierra Club Ontario on Instagram.