Orange 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.

Laura 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.

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 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 since been recovered and thousands more are expected to be found. The Canadian government operated schools like this for over a century to educate, indoctrinate, and assimilate First Nations children. What you may or may not know, however, was that Canada’s system was inspired by our own.

Here in the U.S., the motto was to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Government policies made it possible for a child to be abused for speaking her native language. Some students endured unspeakable abuse and trauma, felt for generations. Orange Shirt Day is one survivor’s attempt to bring attention to the centurylong era of North American history. “When you wear an orange shirt,” Phyllis says, “It’s like a little bit of justice for us survivors in our lifetime in recognition of a system we can never allow again.”

Though I was honored to help organize the event, it was not a celebration. Orange Shirt Day is more of a funeral – a day to remember what was once precious, living, alive, and taken away too soon. The discovery of the mass grave confirmed what indigenous peoples all over the world knew. What happened to native peoples in North America is our genocide – not the one people deny but the one people don’t know about. During the event, Laura Tohe read poetry from No Parole Today, her book about her time in a Residential School in the American Southwest. Tohe’s father was a Code Talker in World War II. She points out that “at the same time that [assimilation] was taking place in the boarding schools, the Navajo code talkers were being asked to come up with a secret code that they could use. These young code talkers – including

my father – who was forbidden to speak Navajo in the schools, were now asked to come up with a code. This code helped save many American lives because it was quick, it was accurate, and it was never deciphered by the Japanese.” Though Vanderhoop noticed parallels among his tribe, the Wampanoag of Aquinnah, and the Navajo, unlike Tohe, he did not grow up speaking his native language. He began learning Wampanoag in his early twenties before becoming an instructor in the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation project. Woody’s three children are now growing up speaking both Wampanoag and English, a feat of resilience after centuries of colonization, removal, and assimilation policies and practices. As part of reclaiming the language he said, “We had our own folks go to MIT and study and become trained linguists in order to not have to rely on some other folks interpreting our language.” He expressed how when he and other tribal members learn to communicate in their ancestral language, that “even a simple greeting, [is] our way of identifying each other and signifying that we have that additional understanding of who we are and where we come from. To me it’s very powerful.” Professors Robyns Worthington (History) and Alejandro Latinez (Spanish and Portuguese) noted that what happened at the boarding school is not in the distant past, as evidenced by Tohe’s presentation and by the Orange Shirt Day story. Federal Indian policies have at their very root abuses of power that peoples all over the world wrestle with, even today. The gathering, though virtual, existed as a show of goodwill from all the participants to build bridges of understanding and empathy for what was lost, or stolen, and ways native ways can be reclaimed and revitalized for future generations. Perhaps the day can be summed up with a contribution from Professor Carlos Almeida, who teaches the traditional Cape Verdean language, when he quoted Nelson Mandela: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”