Allie Ward

It took 200 years for that.

But don't feel too misty about this kind of meager act.

Our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, helped produce and research and encourage this episode for the last few months we've been working on it.

And she notes that as a Canadian, for her, it's very frustrating to see because very few of Canada's national truth and reconciliation commissions calls to action in regard to child welfare and education and health.

justice language and actual reconciliation have actually happened and mostly it's just acknowledging or appointing someone to think about a problem but there have been virtually no material or policy changes so that's a government acknowledging a genocide which is different from a conviction

Now, the victims and survivors of the Canadian residential school system are recognized on September 30th every year in Canada for Orange Shirt Day.

And it's a tradition coined from the story of this one survivor, Phyllis Jack Webstad's account of having this bright, brand new shirt that was orange that her grandmother gave to her right before she left for the residential school.

And it was stripped from her wardrobe.

It was replaced with a uniform.

All ties to her real life felt severed, she said.

And this system existed for over 100 years under the noses of modernity when you may have been alive because the victims and survivors were being cleaned of their old evil ways in the eyes of those that ran them.

Well, I'm wondering, too, which cultures tend to work on a really stark dichotomy with good and bad and sinning and atoning?

And this really like bifurcated kind of philosophical concepts or categorizations of behavior.

And then which ones tend to think of it on a gray scale more?

Which cultures tend to do that big splitting?

This can certainly happen in terms of casualties and war.

And pay attention to who is humanized and who isn't.

And again, we talk a lot about dehumanization and the language of transgression in the genocidology episode.

who is portrayed as an animal or an object and who is considered a fellow human.

And in our victimology episode with Dr. Callie Renison, she explains how certain homicide victim cases are followed closely by the press and pop culture, usually white people, usually women, when in actuality, the largest demographic of homicide victims in the US is black men.