On this Orange Shirt Day we Mourn the Genocide of Indigenous Children on Turtle Island and in Palestine

Written By Nicole Rains

Phyllis Jack Webstad, as a residential school student)

September 30, 2024 marks the 11th year of Orange Shirt Day, or Truth and Reconciliation Day.  Orange Shirt Day was started in Canada in remembrance of all of the child victims of the settler-colonists’ genocidal residential/boarding schools, responsible for countless acts of abuse of all kinds and murders leading to mass graves still being unearthed today. In Canada, the term used is residential school, while in the US, it is boarding school. Children as young as toddlers were forced from their homes by a government whose modus operandi was to “kill the Indian, save the man”. Phyllis Jack Webstad, a member of the Northern Secwpemc (Shuswap) from the Stswecem'c Xgat'tem First Nation (Canoe Creek Indian Band) is a boarding school survivor that bravely shared her story at a St. Joseph Mission (SJM) Residential School Commemoration Project and Reunion event held in British Columbia in spring of 2013. In her story she shared that she was stripped of all of her clothes, including an orange shirt she loved that was never returned. The theft of this orange shirt became symbolic of the stripping of native childrens’ indigenous identities at these schools. 

Orange Shirt Day became a movement and is now recognized as a federal holiday in Canada, which became very prominent during the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). According to Canada.gov, the TRC “provided those directly or indirectly affected by the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools system with an opportunity to share their stories and experiences” and eventually gave them reparations. And though the TRC was carried out over an eight year period and survivors called for the Canadian government to search for the bodies of murdered children around the schools, it was refused. Then a few years ago, First Nations across Canada began searching on their own, finding thousands of bodies from newborn to adulthood–many in mass unmarked graves. This action triggered Tribal Nations in the US to follow suit in similar searches, though there still is a long way to go in the US in terms of the search and any type of truth and reconciliation.

Michael Littlevoice, a Ponca and Omana man from Ponca City, Okla., plays the lute in front of the casket of samuel Flying Horse. Littlevoice telt compelled to attend the event to help the community heal and celebrate. Ine words of his song are: "After all of these years, I'm home, I'm home. I'm home after all these years." Charles Fox / Special to ICT

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Laguna Pueblo tribe member and descendant of boarding school survivors Deb Haaland released a recent report claiming that at least 973 children died while forcibly attending boarding schools between 1819 and 1969, and that 53 burial sites were investigated at over 400 federally run boarding schools.  Many researchers have indicated that that number is likely closer to 40,000. 

On September 22, 2024, less than a week prior to this article’s writing, three Oglala child victims, Fannie Charging Shield , Samuel Flying Horse, and James Cornman, were returned home from Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the US’ most notorious boarding school, and reburied in their homelands. Fannie Charging Shield was the daughter of an Oglala chief who was sent to Carlisle less than two months after the government massacre at Wounded Knee and one of a rare few whose fate was known by her father, however, the school refused to pay for the shipment of her body and she was buried in Carlisle, another victim of the genocide treated with no dignity by the government or the Christians who stole her from her family into a disease-filled, overpopulated, abuse and suicide ridden prison for children–essentially a concentration camp. This is just one of thousands of stories of children being murdered at the hands of the colonial-capitalist governments, another step in the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which provided the excuse for the genocide committed by the heartless government officials who kidnapped our children. A recent documentary, Sugarcane, is an excellent but heartbreaking native-directed film about the survivors of Sugarcane Reserve, in British Columbia, that depicts survivors and their community reconciling with their pain and breaking intergenerational trauma caused by the Catholic Church run boarding school.

Amongst our own Great Plains Action Society team, not a member of us hasn’t been touched by the residential/boarding school system or the forced removal policies of the US/Canadian governments. Many of our elders were too traumatized to share stories or are still affected by the assimilation policies of the Catholic Church and fear talking ill of the church. Our Executive Director, Sikowis Nobiss, is a member of the George Gordon First Nation in Southern Saskatchewan, which was host to the longest running residential school in Canada. It did not close down until 1996. She graduated high school in1995 and was old enough to have attended this school with her cousins. Many of her relatives attended the school, including her aunt and her grandmother. Sikowis’s grandfather also attended a residential school where his culture and language was also beaten out of him and because both of her grandparents lost so much, her father, aunties and uncles did not grow up with a lof of their culture. Luckily, they still passed on the stories and ways of being that are also very important. 

Trisha Rivers, our Siouxland Project Director, has family who went to Genoa boarding school in Nebraska, our Representation Director Jessica Engelking’s maternal grandmother attended boarding school and our managing director Marie Krebs’ family was forced to hide their identity and claim ‘Spanish’ to survive and avoid the genocidal kidnappings. Other former employees’ parents were taken by the forced rehoming of children before the Indian Child Welfare Act and were adopted away from their tribe with little to no documentation and have become isolated from their tribe with no chance of enrollment.  The truth is that most Indigenous Peoples have a connection with residential/boarding schools in some way.

My own grandmother left her homeland of Pine Ridge to escape the boarding school system her sisters were subjected to and forced to live in a racist town where people called her slurs every day, which discouraged her from expressing her Indigeneity outside of the home. Many of my memories of her talking about her youth were tearful recountings of starting over in a new state, losing touch with the old ways and facing aggressive racism, the same slurs I myself was later called as a native youth. 

This Orange Shirt Day, let us not only remember the children the government stole from us but also that today Every Child Matters as we continue to face down governmental entities still taking and harming our children. We will always survive. We were always here and we will always be here. As the ReMatriation of our lost children’s remains continues, as the government continues to acknowledge the atrocities committed against our people, we must band together and make sure that this genocide stops and stand in solidarity against other genocides committed by the US and Canadian government to this day.  We honor our lost children and ancestors and vow to continue the fight to not lose any more children or future ancestors to the genocidal christo-patriarchal war machine. 

With this being said, we want to end here by giving all our love and solidarity to the victims of the Indigenous Palestinian genocide and to the thousands of children murdered at the hands of Israeli and US colonialism.