Orange Shirt Day

 Orange Shirt Day

Part of Teaching History

 

This past Thursday, September 30^th, was Orange Shirt Day.

 

Orange Shirt Day originated in Canada and has spread to the United States. It is known formally as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and was designed to educate and raise awareness of the Indian residential school systems in Canada and the U.S. along with their impact on Indigenous communities for over 100 years. 

 

In the 1800s, governments in both countries sought to absorb indigenous peoples into their majority societies by creating residential schools which took native children from their families to wipe out their heritage, language, and values by teaching Native children Anglo-European language and culture. Native names were changed to sound more like the names of White children and the use of native languages was forbidden. Native spiritual traditions were ignored and supplanted by Anglo European religious practices and holidays. 

 

The schools were largely funded by the governments and run by religious groups, mainly Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian. Only recently have some of these groups apologized for their roles in this inhumane activity.

 

The separation of children from their parents was mandatory and enforced by law enforcement agents who seized the children and brought them to the schools. Parents had to get a “pass” from the agent on their reservation to visit with their children. 

 

The schools were underfunded and diseases like tuberculosis were rampant. Many children were sexually abused and died at these schools. The recent revelation of thousands of unmarked graves at former school sites has increased scrutiny and condemnation of the past practices. 

 

Even though these schools and their practices were condemned starting in the 1920s, it took a long time for the schools to be closed. The last one in Canada was closed in 1996.

 

Orange Shirt Day was started in 2013 by a residential school survivor in Canada, Phyllis Jack Webstad. She recounted being taken from her family at the age of six to a residential school where she was stripped of her clothes, including the new orange shirt given to her by her grandmother. It was never returned. The Orange Shirt now symbolizes the identities stripped from Native children by the schools. 

 

To try and atone for these wrongs, the Canadian government made September 30^th a national holiday. It recognizes the day on which the children were rounded up and taken to the residential schools. Canadians put together educational programs and television shows to recount the horrors of these practices, hoping to ensure they are not repeated. Canadian commissions were formed to study the past events and come up with strategies to honor First Nation tribes and their members. 

 

Indigenous peoples’ history in the United States has not been recognized as well as it has been in Canada. Our residential schools were just as bad as those to the North. We have not done anything substantial to rectify the wrongs perpetrated in them.

 

The United States government was even more ruthless in carrying out the Indian Wars in our Western territories, massacring millions of people while relocating the survivors to reservations that remain to this day. We still ignore treaties made with tribes when they conflict with things like mines, pipelines, harvesting of fish and rice, and wolf hunts. Tribal efforts to protect the environment for all of us are mostly ignored or rejected. 

 

We can learn from our Northern neighbors that teaching the true history of past wrongs helps heal the wounds those wrongs caused. Reconciliation can only come with an honest self-appraisal of past misdeeds and atrocities.

 

Our elected representatives in Madison seem not to have figured this out. Our state Assembly, with all our local representatives in support, recently passed a bill banning the teaching of the history and impact of our systemic racism in Wisconsin public schools. As if this will forever hide those transgressions of the past from seeing the light of day. Of course, passage of the bill is merely symbolic of the culture wars that make up the current GOP agenda. It will never survive a Governor Evers’ veto. 

 

We need to confront our real history, including our complicity in the selling of human slaves, to make sure it never happens again. Just claiming that racism is done, does not make it go away.  We also need to recognize and rectify our abysmal history when it comes to how we dealt with those who were already living here when our westward expansion sacrificed their way of life. 

 

Maybe that can start with the elimination, once and for all, of the use of Native mascots and names for cities, towns, villages, public schools, and sports teams.