Each year on Sept. 30, Indigenous communities across the United States and Canada recognize Orange Shirt Day. It's a day of remembrance for the Indigenous children who were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools.
The day, also known as the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools in the U.S. and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, honors survivors, their families, and the children who never returned home.
According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, by 1926, nearly 83% of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools. Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families and homelands.
In the U.S., there were over 500 schools. Of those, 125 of those schools are still open today throughout the U.S.
Children were often prohibited from speaking their Native languages or practicing their cultures and religions, and many experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, disease, and neglect.
The Orange Shirt Day movement began with residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad, whose new orange shirt was taken from her when she arrived at a Canadian residential school at 6 years old. Today, the shirt represents the message that every child matters.
For Amanda Cheromiah, who is Laguna Pueblo, remembrance is part of her everyday life.
"Every day in Carlisle is Orange Shirt Day for me," she said. "I live, work and pray in this place of significant memory and existence for our Native people."
Cheromiah is the executive director of the Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated from 1879 to 1918 and was the first federally operated off-reservation boarding school in the United States. Nearly 8,000 Indigenous children from roughly 200 tribal nations and communities attended the school during its 39 years of operation.
Children arrived at Carlisle under a range of circumstances, Cheromiah said. Some were taken or coerced into attending, while others were sent by their families, were orphaned, or, in some cases, came as prisoners of war like the Hopi community.
"The school was designed to culturally eradicate our Native young people," Cheromiah said.
Carlisle became a model for other federal Indian boarding schools across the country. Its founder and first superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt, advocated a philosophy that sought to strip Native children of their cultures and identities; an approach he famously summarized with the phrase, "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
For Cheromiah, those experiences aren't confined to history.
"We have to acknowledge that those systems impact us today, a lot of our Native people today," she said. "And I think that's why it's so important to not only acknowledge and remember, but to pray and to connect in ceremony."
While places like Carlisle carry a painful history, Cheromiah says they also reflect the endurance of generations who survived those systems and the Native communities that continue to thrive today.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
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