September 30th was Orange Shirt Day, a national Canadian holiday honoring and remembering the suffering of Indigenous children in colonial residential schools. All across Canada, people wear orange shirts to commemorate the holiday. Orange Shirt Day is celebrated in the United States, but knowledge of residential schools and acknowledgment of the holiday is nowhere near as high-profile as it is in Canada.
The story of Orange Shirt Day originates from a Canadian Indigenous woman named Phyllis Jack Webstad, who was sent to a residential school in 1973 at the age of 6. Her grandmother had helped her pick out a brand new shirt for her first day of school, and she had chosen a bright orange one that she really loved. On her first day, she wore her shirt, but upon arriving at school, the nuns stripped her down and took away her brand new shirt. She never saw it again. She translated the feelings that came with this day into her two books “Phyllis’ Orange Shirt” and “Orange Shirt Story,” the latter of which fellow students and I read on my first Orange Shirt Day at a Canadian school.
During my three years in Canada, I witnessed three Orange Shirt Days. The treatment of the Indigenous peoples of Canada was a topic frequently discussed, not only on this day, but in school classes and general conversation. Growing up in the United States until the age of twelve I had never heard of these institutions, and was shocked to learn that this country had residential schools too. So what is the history of residential schools in the United States?
In both Canada and the United States, residential schools were Catholic “boarding schools” created with the intention to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” This goal of assimilation was executed through means of violent torture of the Indigenous children in both countries. In Canada, it is estimated that at least 4,100 Indigenous children died as a result of residential schools, although Murray Sinclair, a former Canadian senator and chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Committee, believes the number to be closer to 10,000. Efforts to uncover the atrocities of residential schools in Canada have been met with attempts to ignore and cover them up. In comparison, efforts in the United States have been minimal. Acknowledgement of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in US residential schools is non-existent in the United States, despite being a model for the early residential schools of Canada. Compared to the thousands in Canada, only around 500 deaths have been uncovered in the United States, demonstrating a lack of effort to right these wrongs.
The remembrance of residential schools is significant due to the fact that this is not some distant occurrence of the past. The recent discovery of mass graves at Kamloops, BC residential schools demonstrates that we have barely scratched the surface of the atrocities committed to the Indigenous children of the United States and Canada. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1998 (1996 in the US), meaning that almost every Indigenous person alive today is either a survivor of these institutions or related to one. The effects of residential schools still linger in Indigenous communities, through trauma and PTSD. These effects and others are passed on to future generations.
The Canadian government has apologized for residential schools, and yet despite the parallels in the history of residential schools between the United States and Canada, the topic is far less discussed in the United States and an apology has yet to be made. This raises the question, why do we not honor and celebrate Orange Shirt Day nearly as much here in the US?
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