Youth Orange Shirt Day 2023, IRSHDC Design by Alec Guerin

Youth Orange Shirt Day 2023 IRSHDC

$20.00

All net profits arising from the UBC Bookstore’s T-shirt sales will be donated to both the Indian Residential School Survivors Society (IRSSS) and the Orange Shirt Society.

Each year, the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC) works with an Indigenous artist to create a unique Orange Shirt Day t-shirt design. This year’s shirts feature the work of Musqueam artist Alec Guerin. 

Artist’s Statement
My ancestral name is telnaq’e and my English name is Alec Guerin and I’m from Musqueam.
  My relationship with art is a fickle one. I find it super important to my wellbeing that I creatively express myself, but it can also be a source of anxiety for me. I like to create in all forms. I consider myself a storyteller, first and foremost. But I also have spent a lot of time in the digital art world, and I also enjoy woodworking as well. Having the opportunity to throw myself into this design was super cathartic for me. It was important to me to create this piece to show to myself that it’s something that I could do, that Musqueam art was something that I could continue to incorporate into the ways I express myself.
  The Orange Shirt Day design that I did for this year is really significant to me and my own personal journey. I’ve always kind of dabbled in doing work in Musqueam’s’ traditional style. But I’ve always shied away from it because I felt like I wasn’t good enough, or I didn’t know enough; which definitely can be linked to the traumas and the fallout of Residential Schools. So much of being an Indigenous person in the 21st century, from my perspective, is battling against those traumas, those pains and that shame that stems from the attempts to disconnect us from our culture and our ways of being. One of the ways that I really have experienced that is with our language as well as with our art.
The idea behind the design is representing how the impacts of colonization and Residential Schools is not a local issue or even a regional issue. It’s a global issue. A big piece of what Residential Schools tried to do was disconnect us from who we are and where we come from and that’s something that is still ongoing today. For example, a young Indigenous person is expected to go to a public high school. And that high school has a curriculum that’s interchangeable with basically any high school in the province. So, there isn’t that connection of contextualizing who you are and where you are in the world. I wanted to represent the importance of that by portraying the land as animals. And when I was having to prioritize how I was making that portrayal, I did end up having to pare it down to what I thought were the two most important parts. Which is the Musqueam and UBC relationship, so a Thunderbird and a fish. I asked, “what really makes a Thunderbird, what do you see in Musqueam designs about the salmon that are important to reflect?” and really spent time on each animal specifically before laying them out. I used a reference of the globe to add some negative space representing the other land masses.

About National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and Orange Shirt Day:

Each year, September 30 marks the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

The day honours the children who never returned home and Survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.

This federal statutory holiday was created through legislative amendments made by Parliament.

Both the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day take place on September 30.

Orange Shirt Day is an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day intended to raise awareness of the individual, family and community inter-generational impacts of residential schools, and to promote the concept of “Every Child Matters”.  The orange shirt is a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.

On September 30, we encourage all Canadians to wear orange to honour the thousands of Survivors of residential schools.