09/30/2026
"The Handprints We Must See"
By: Brent Keough
Today, orange carries a weight
that no colour should have to carry.
A small handprint rests in each lens,
asking something difficult of us:
to look long enough
that seeing becomes responsibility.
Every child taken from home
already belonged somewhere.
To a family. To a language.
To a voice that knew their name.
To the ordinary, precious life
of being held when the world felt too large.
Think of what a childhood should hold.
A familiar face at the door.
A place at the kitchen table.
Someone listening to the story
you cannot wait to tell.
Someone coming when you are afraid.
Then sit with what was taken.
Governments and churches built a system
that reached into families
and pulled children from their lives.
Languages were punished.
Names were changed.
Some children never came home.
There are families still searching.
There are survivors who have carried
what happened to them
through years when this country
would scarcely make room
to hear it spoken.
And pain can travel through a family
without anyone choosing to pass it on.
It can enter the way a person sleeps,
the way they reach for love,
the way they hold their children close
and fear what might take them away.
A calendar turns easily.
People carry things longer.
September ends.
A survivor still wakes
inside the life they have spent years
trying to make their own.
Truth asks us to stay
when the story becomes difficult.
To hear a survivor’s words
without reaching for an excuse.
To let what we learn change
what we are willing to accept.
There are languages being carried forward.
Children hearing love
in words someone once tried to silence.
There are elders teaching,
families creating, communities building
the futures they choose for themselves.
We have work to do alongside remembrance.
To listen when survivors speak.
To learn what was left out of our lessons.
To honour Indigenous rights
and follow remembrance
with choices that can be felt.
These small handprints
reach into the way we see.
They ask us to remember
that each child had a whole life ahead:
things to discover, people to love,
a future that belonged to them.
Every child matters.
A child’s worth should never have needed
a national reminder.
Let those words stay with us
when the orange shirts are folded away.
Let tomorrow find evidence
that we meant them.
