Local student wins trip to Nunavut in national Orange Shirt Day design contest

Aliyah Bautista (left), the winner of the 2024 Orange Shirt Day Design Contest and her teacher Kelly Shimp. (CTV News Edmonton)

A Ponoka school is celebrating a hat trick of wins in a national contest for Orange Shirt Day.

The Orange Shirt Day Design Contest, held by the Orange Shirt Society, was open to all Kindergarten to Grade 12 students across Canada.

The aim is to help spread awareness of the ongoing impacts of residential schools. Using their art skills and creativity, students submit designs and the meaning behind them.

For the third year in a row, a student from St. Augustine School in Ponoka won the contest.

"I genuinely was so surprised, because it never crossed my mind that I would win," Aliyah Bautista, the 2024 contest winner, said.

"It was really a shocking thing to find out."

Bautista wanted to emphasize the child in the phrase "every child matters" with her piece.

"I thought it would be really important that everyone really, truly knows the meaning of every child matters, because it really did affect a lot of people in their life, and it changed their life dramatically and negatively," Bautista said.

St. Augustine School celebrates Orange Shirt Day once a month, rather than once a year, according to one of the school's teachers. It's used as an opportunity to educate students and teachers on this part of Canada's history.

"We've learned about the things that the schools had done to the community, how it impacted the people, how they lost their culture, their families and some of them, their lives," Kelly Shimp, a technology and art teacher at St. Augustine, said.

"It's important to know what happened to them."

In 2023, then-Grade 10 student Charliss Santos won the contest and in 2022, then-Grade 11 student Geraldine Catalbas won.

"It's so surprising, she's very talented as an artist, but it's just such an honour that students here were recognized again," Shimp said.

As part of the prize for winning, Catalbas went to Ottawa to participate in Orange Shirt Day events and met the Prime Minister and Phyllis Webstad, the founder of the Orange Shirt Society.

Santos went to B.C. to celebrate with Webstad and her family last year. This year, Bautista and Webstad will go to Nunavut to celebrate the holiday.

"Phyllis is very hands on, (she) has been making the phone calls to our students and interacting with them," Shimp said.

"It's not just a photo op, it's a relationship that she actually has with the students that have won … she's kind of inspiring."

National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, on Sept. 30, was originally known as Orange Shirt Day.

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nahreman Issa