Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.As the end of September approaches, my Facebook feed is suddenly awash with paid ads for orange shirts and caps with an array of designs inspired by West Coast indigenous art.This social media sales frenzy has been growing in recent years, since the concept of Orange Shirt Day was officially adopted and promoted by the BC government and others. I’ve encouraged this advertising blitz by clicking on several of the offerings, not to purchase but to check their origin and validity. Facebook’s user algorithm picks up on that activity, directing more ads to me and getting a cut from the action.Another Facebook user tipped me to this a couple of years ago, dissecting an ad that was festooned with hashtags such as #haida to suggest a BC origin for the product. Drilling down, he discovered that the shirts were designed in Texas and made in China..BEN-AMI: Note to PM Carney: End the diplomatic virtue signaling, focus on the real problem.This year, the sales pitches have run out of control. Suppliers go by names such as Northtrustwears, North Maple Wear, Red Rebel Armour, Dreamcatcher Dialogues, Rezspirit, and others. Some warn purchasers to avoid imposters, but their own offerings don’t inspire a lot of confidence.For example, “Decolonial Clothing” features a man wearing a decorated New York Yankees cap while denouncing cultural appropriation. His ad urges me to “wear the message, fund the movement,” and “start conversations about land back.” He’s selling “land back” t-shirts with a logo that looks more like an embroidered English rose than any indigenous design. The website assures buyers they are “printed on Turtle Island” and provides two phone numbers for operators identified only as Casey and Dakota..“Warning: your favourite brands might be lying to you,” says Red Rebel Armour in one of its posts, touting a shirt design by a “Metis artist.” Customers are assured they come from somewhere in Canada. Another gets the slogan wrong, attracting many corrections from Facebook users to its assertion that “all child matters.” If you like dreamcatchers made in China from monofilament fishing line, these shirts and hats are for you.The most outrageous claim comes from a site I won’t identify here, to avoid giving it any more traffic. Aimed at the US market, it correctly uses the slogan “every child matters,” over a video of an unidentified young man performing a vaguely indigenous-style dance in a field of dry grass..EDITORIAL: If Nenshi says the pornographic books are fine in school libraries, bring them to the mic.Superimposed over the video is this claim: “Currently 6509 indigenous children have been unearthed from unmarked mass burial graves.” This is presumably an effort to add up all of the unsubstantiated claims that have arisen from a taxpayer-funded program of sweeping old residential school grounds with ground-penetrating radar and describing soil anomalies as secret graves.As other writers have documented at the Western Standard and elsewhere, some of these sites are known community graveyards where wooden markers disappeared over more than a century. This is the case for the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, where former prime minister Justin Trudeau knelt with a teddy bear to promote the false claim that the well-known community graveyard was one of the alleged secret sites.I was among the reporters who in 2021 credulously recounted the story told by Phyllis Webstad, a part-indigenous woman who claims she attended the residential school in Williams Lake for one year. Webstad came to the BC legislature to thank the BC Lions for promoting her orange shirt initiative at a home game.Residential school researcher Nina Green has documented the missing information in Webstad’s 2018 book that has been placed in school libraries across Canada. Webstad did not attend St. Joseph’s residential school in 1973 when she was six years old. St. Joseph’s was no longer a school, the building serving as a dormitory for children attending public school. The book’s cover depicts a young girl in an orange shirt, menaced by nuns. Webstad recalled arriving at the school and being given a change of clothes, a bath, and a haircut as was the practice for schools admitting students who had spent the summer on reserves or in remote hunting and fishing camps. There is no evidence offered that any nuns were present at the former school in 1973, years after the federal government had taken control of schools formerly run by churches..HANNAFORD: How China will Cubanize Canada's roads.Webstad is the founder and now CEO of a charity called the Orange Shirt Society, which lists a staff of five and a board of directors including Willie Sellars, chief of the Williams Lake First Nation. Sellars was active in promoting a documentary called Sugarcane, which Western Standard columnists Michelle Stirling and Brian Giesbrecht have shown to be based on a twisted tale of a newborn baby abandoned at the school in 1959.The mother pleaded guilty to abandoning the child, who survived, and served time in jail. She was 20 years old, four years too old to be a student at any residential school.Don’t bother trying to find an authentic orange shirt. There is no such thing.Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984. He lives in Victoria.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc
