Every year around this time, the orange squares come out. Profile pictures change. Companies post a land acknowledgement someone else wrote for them, and then go quiet until next September.

October 1 arrives, and everything goes back to how it was.

Ten years. Fewer than twenty.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report in December 2015 with 94 Calls to Action. Those were not suggestions. They were laid out as a foundation for bringing about greater equity and addressing the injustices and long-lasting impacts of colonization on our people.

They were drawn from thousands of hours of survivor testimony, from people who sat down and described the worst things that ever happened to them, on the record, so that this country could never again say it didn't know.

Ten years later, fewer than 20 of those 94 have been fully implemented.

That is what a decade of Idle No More, orange shirts, land acknowledgements and public commitments to reconciliation has produced. Ninety-four specific, actionable, written-down items, and we haven't cleared twenty.

Just like the saying, "the best apology is changed behaviour," a day of reflection that changes nothing is just a day off.

What it's like to open the app

Here is my September, every year.

I open social media and I am met with post after post determined to make people angry at us. Land claims framed as theft. Treaty rights framed as special treatment. Court decisions framed as an attack on ordinary Canadians. The posts are pure rage-bait, and the comment sections deliver it in droves.

Not on my posts. I want to be clear about that. My own community is good to me. It's everywhere else. It's the comments under a news story about a land settlement. It's countless "average Canadians" deciding to explain their made-up version of history.

You cannot scroll past that month after month, year after year, and be unaffected by it. Then September 30 arrives and we're expected to produce something gracious and educational for an audience that spent the other 364 days denying the colonial truth.

That is the part I'm tired of.

What I'm asking of allies

I'm going to be direct, because the polite version hasn't had the impact needed to move the needle.

Indigenous people are doing almost all of the educating in this country, and we are doing it while being the ones harmed. That is backwards. If you consider yourself an ally, the work is not posting an orange square where other allies will see it.

The work is arguing with your uncle.

Speak in rooms we're not in. The conversation that matters is the one happening where no Indigenous person is present to hear it. That's the room where you're useful. Nothing you post in a room full of people who already agree with you moves anything.

Learn enough to hold the argument alone. Don't tag us into a comment thread to come defend ourselves. Know what the treaties actually are. Know what the Calls to Action actually say. Know why "but that was generations ago" is not the defence people think it is. The last residential school closed in 1996.

Don't send us the screenshots. I know it's meant as solidarity. It puts the thing directly in front of me a second time.

Pick one Call to Action and follow it. All 94 are published and free to read. Choose one relevant to where you work or live and ask the actual question of your employer, your school board, your municipal council, your MP. Ask what's been done. Ask again in six months.

Do it in a month with no orange in it. February. July. The test of whether reconciliation is real is whether anything happens when nobody is watching for it.

What marking the day actually looks like

Wear the shirt. Genuinely, wear it. Visibility matters, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Then do something the shirt can't do on its own.

Read the Calls to Action. Read a survivor's account, in their own words. Find out whose territory you're on and what the actual agreement covering it says. Give money to an Indigenous-led organization doing the work locally.

If you buy anything with Every Child Matters on it, find out who designed it, who profits from it, and where that money goes. That question alone would clean up a lot of what's being sold this month--you'd be surprised at how many overseas print on demand outfits are profiting from this movement, and dollars that will never reach Indigenous communities.

And when someone in your life says something ugly about us, say something back.

That's it. That's the whole ask.

One last thing

We sell Every Child Matters shirts.

Andy Everson, my husband in case you don't know, created what has become one of the most identifiable designs associated with this movement. Together, through Totem Design House, we contribute to Copper Legacy Indigenous Empowerment Society because giving back has been part of my business from day one.

Andy also allows other people and organizations to use his Every Child Matters design, with one condition: proceeds must be donated to one of three Indigenous organizations doing the work, the Orange Shirt Society founded by residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad, the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, or Copper Legacy Indigenous Empowerment Society.

So yes, wear the shirt.

But don't let wearing it be the thing you did.

Because reconciliation was never supposed to be something Indigenous people performed once a year for everyone else.

It was supposed to change something.