September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation – colloquially known as Orange Shirt Day. It began in Canada but now we observe it in the U.S. too: a day to recognize the atrocities of the residential school system that devastated so many Indigenous communities.
The U.S. government ran their boarding school program from 1819 to 1978. (The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has catalogued more than 370 schools in 29 states.) Children were forcibly separated from their families, tribes, and ancestral teachings. The idea was to “kill the Indian in him, save the man,” as the founder of Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School cruelly put it. The schools cut the children’s hair, took away their clothes and belongings, changed their names, and told them they weren’t allowed to speak their own language even to each other.
Kamloops Residential School
Children worked in the kitchen, laundry, and fields as part of their “industrial training.” Summers were spent performing arduous manual labor; back at school, they slept in dirty quarters where tuberculosis and other infections ran rampant. Malnourished, beaten and sexually abused, thousands died. Others survived, scarred from neglect, violence, and the memories of burying their classmates in mass graves.
Told by nuns, priests, and teachers that no one would believe their stories, many survivors internalized trauma that manifested in self-harm, substance abuse, and mental illness.
Healing the Past on Orange Shirt Day
Today, we mark Orange Shirt Day with 3 words: Every Child Matters. Because the residential schools have had a multi-generational impact on families through cultural loss and historical trauma – an impact that affects Native children born today. While the barbaric history of the schools is framed as something that’s over and done with, its destructive legacy lives on in the form of cumulative and collective trauma.
Our team wore orange shirts to show our commitment to healing and reconciliation. We can’t change the past, but we can support a happier and healthier future for all children and survivors affected by these atrocities.
