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Above, Wampanoag language instructor, Durwood Vandershoop and right, Laura Tohe, Navajo Nation Poet Laureate.
SHIRT DAY
A more truthful history by Stacie Charbonneau Hess
On September 30, via Zoom, a small committee of educators at Bristol Community College presented an event to honor the Native children who survived (and the ones who did not) the Residential Schools in North America.
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aura Tohe, Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, and Durwood Vanderhoop, Wampanoag language instructor, spoke at the event sponsored by Bristol’s Holocaust and Genocide Center. The virtual event honored a Canadian-born tradition called Orange Shirt Day and was joined by sister events at Bridgewater State University. The educators involved in Orange Shirt Day are committed to telling a more inclusive and truthful history of the present-day United States, no matter how uncomfortable. Healing historical wounds that live in the memory of native peoples cannot heal until they are fully revealed. So much of Native American history has been white-washed or left out of textbooks, and this event was one way to bring the atrocities to light, and highlight the resilience of indigenous peoples.
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The Orange Shirt is just a symbol of the many things that were taken away from native children: their language, cultural, family and tribal identity. It was the first time many people, educators included, had heard of Orange Shirt Day – the day to formally recognize survivors of Residential schools. Orange Shirt Day grew organically from the testimony of a First Nations woman named Phyllis Webstad in Canada. She told her story during Canada’s truth and reconciliation process of her grandmother buying her a shiny, orange shirt for her first day at the “Mission School.” When she got there, her shirt
December 2021 | The South Coast Insider
was taken away from her and she never saw it again. Of course, the Orange Shirt is just a symbol of the many things that were taken away from native children: their language, cultural, family, and tribal identity. The assimilationist policies of America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aimed to “civilize the savages” and further the tenets of Manifest Destiny that the founders of the country staked their claims on. Though Phyllis spent one year in a residential school, many thousands of children spent much longer, and some never made it home. You may have read that in May of this year that the remains of 215 children were found buried in unmarked graves outside one of these schools in Canada. Hundreds more have
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