[UPDATED April 17, 2026]
The first printing of My Street Remembers uses the phrase “Every Child Matters.” Since that printing, we have learned that this phrase is trademarked by the Orange Shirt Society. As such, we referred to it without authorization and outside the context of the significant work of Phyllis Webstad and the Orange Shirt Society.
The hope for My Street Remembers is to encourage young readers to learn about place to reflect more personally on Truth and Reconciliation. Phyllis Webstad and the Orange Shirt Society have long walked this path. Their encouragement of people to speak their truths and share their experiences has activated reconciliation efforts in Canada and internationally.
We fully support the mission of the Orange Shirt Society and Phyllis Webstad to honour Indian Residential School Survivors and their families. It was not our intention to profit from their work, yet our actions caused harm. We sincerely apologize to them for this error and are working with them to rectify it.
In addition to this apology, here are other actions that came from our conversation with the Orange Shirt Society:
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We are no longer shipping the first printing of My Street Remembers. All copies in our warehouses are being pulped;
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The artwork has been revised for our second printing;
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We offered a retroactive licensing fee as well as royalties on copies sold.
For full context, “Every Child Matters” originally appeared in an illustration, written on a banner in a community march. We erred in reproducing a trademarked phrase without payment and without crediting the impact that Phyllis Webstad and the Orange Shirt Society have made on our country’s history.
We are also indebted to the wisdom of the Traditional Knowledge Keepers and Indigenous scholars who are already credited in the book, and who have supported the meaningful collaboration between Karen, Cathie and Groundwood, every step of the way.
The mix of our cultural backgrounds is expressly important. We do not believe that the labour of reflection, education and amplification should be the responsibility of Indigenous people alone. For Reconciliation to be sustainable, we believe the work must also be taken up by newcomers to this country and those of settler heritage.
In this way, Karen, Cathie and I consider My Street Remembers an act of Reconciliation. We may not have gotten it totally right the first time. But thanks to the feedback and encouragement of the Orange Shirt Society—and thanks to the interest of you, our readers—I believe the next edition will get us closer.
— Karen Li, publisher of Groundwood Books, on behalf of author Karen Krossing and illustrator Cathie Jamieson
