Orange Shirt Day: Commemorating the Boarding School Experience
At our most recent staff meeting, we invited our team to wear orange (or something of personal or cultural significance) to mark the upcoming Orange Shirt Day on September 30. Orange Shirt Day commemorates the Indigenous experience of North American boarding and residential schools. The day of remembrance came about through the hard work of Indigenous activists and truth tellers in Canada. U.S.-based activists have since joined in to commemorate the experiences and the journeys toward healing of those who were taken from their homes and Tribes to be forcibly assimilated at boarding and residential schools.
All of our staff of Indigenous descent, like Indigenous people throughout the U.S. and Canada, have experienced losses in their families because of boarding and residential schools. Orange Shirt Day is about remembering, resilience, strength, restoration, justice, and healing. At NCARC, we are particularly interested in this last part: healing. When CACs are led by Native nations or when Tribes are actively involved in the centers that serve their children, CACs are places of community healing. They provide a place for us to acknowledge and hold difficult and painful truths and to offer culturally grounded healing and justice to our children and families.
On this day of truth and reconciliation, we’d like to offer a few resources that we at NCARC and the National Native Children Trauma’s Center (NNCTC) have developed that we hope can help us acknowledge, confront, understand, and heal from our collective historical experiences.
RESOURCES
The Boarding School Legacy: This roundup blog post showcases personal essays by NNCTC staff Kimee Wind-Hummingbird and Shannon Crossbear, as well as a reflection by former NNCTC consultant Patrice Kunesh, on how the boarding school experience continues to resonate today.
Engaging Native Families: In this webinar, recently retired NNCTC Senior Director Marilyn Bruguier Zimmerman discusses collective trauma histories including the boarding school experience and their influence on how service providers should approach Indigenous children and families today.
NCARC Practice Brief 3: Tribal Children and Forced Assimilation: This practice brief provides a historical overview of the different eras of the government-backed attempts to forcibly assimilate Tribal children into mainstream U.S. culture as a means of destroying Tribes.
NCARC Practice Brief 7: An Interview with NCARC’s Deanna Chancellor on the Effectiveness and Flexibility of the CAC Model: NCARC Project Director Deanna Chancellor, who collaborated with her Tribe as a CAC Director for 18 years, discusses how Tribes can tailor the CAC model to their children’s needs.
NCARC Practice Brief 9: Honoring Indigenous Lifeways: Ethleen Iron Cloud-Two Dogs, a Cultural Consultant and Training and Technical Assistance Specialist with NCARC and NNCTC, discusses Oglala Lakota ceremonies that promote child safety, well-being, and cultural connection.
NCARC Practice Brief 10: Why Should My Tribe Consider Developing a Multidisciplinary Team? This brief practice brief is an informational resource that explains what a Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) is and how Tribal ownership of the MDT response can make a difference in outcomes for children and families.