ORANGE
SHIRT DAY
Orange Shirt Day, observed each year on September 30th, commemorates the children taken into residential and boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada. It is a time to honor the children who never returned home from residential schools and to recognize the survivors and families who still carry this history.
It is both a day of mourning and resilience, and a reminder that the legacies of these policies still reverberate through Tribal communities today.
Orange Shirt Day
Orange Shirt Day is observed annually on September 30th to honor and commemorate the Indigenous children who were taken from their homes and forced into residential and boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada.
The day takes its name from the experience of Phyllis Webstad (Northern Secwpemc), who at the age of six had her new orange shirt taken away on her first day at a residential school. That shirt came to symbolize the stripping away of identity, family ties, and Cultural belonging that Indigenous children endured at the hands of American and Canadian colonial violence.
Today, Orange Shirt Day is a time to remember the children who were never returned home, to acknowledge the survivors and their families, and to affirm that “Every Child Matters.”
It is also a call for truth, justice and healing – reminding us that these events are not distant history, but living legacies that shape Indigenous communities today.
The Indian Boarding School Era
In the United States, the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 laid the groundwork for what became known as the Indian Boarding School Era. By the late 1800s, hundreds (eventually 367 in the United States) federally and church-run schools operated with the express goal of assimilation under the slogan: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
For nearly 100 years, Native children as young as four were taken from their homes, stripped of their hair, clothes, languages, and names, and involuntarily placed into military-style institutions. Within these schools, children were forced to convert to Christianity and undergo complete assimilation into Eurocentric and settler-colonial ways of life.
Speaking their Native language or practicing traditional Culture was met with punishment, and many children experienced severe physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse. An untold number of Indigenous children were lost forever to these institutions, their bodies buried without record or return, leaving generations of families in mourning and uncertainty.
By 1926, nearly 83% of all Indigenous school-aged children in the U.S. (over 70,000 children) were in boarding schools. These policies created enormous ruptures in Tribal family systems, leading to the widespread loss of languages, traditional lifeways, and generational knowledge. Such policies were not only acts of Cultural erasure; they meet the United Nations’ definition of genocide.
EVOLUTION TO ADOPTION ERA
The end of the Boarding School Era did not mean the end of assimilationist child-removal policies. Beginning in the 1950s, the Adoption Era saw Native children placed in non-Native foster and adoptive families at staggering rates. By the 1960s, one in four Indigenous children lived apart from their communities. This practice continued to sever Cultural ties as effectively as the Boarding Schools.
NCR Tribal Chairman Richard Johnson was adopted by a non-Native family at the age of two
The Adoption Era was just as insidious as the boarding school system before it. It placed Native children in white homes where their identities were erased through silence, rather than overt punishment.
Many of today’s Tribal Elders grew up in these households, separated from their languages, traditions, and kinship networks. For countless adoptees, the result was a lifelong struggle to understand where they belonged, neither fully accepted into Western society, nor connected to their Tribal communities.
These removals fractured not just families, but entire Tribal communities, perpetuating the goals of assimilation and Cultural genocide under a different name.
NISENAN AND ASSIMILATION POLICIES
For the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, the Boarding School and Adoption Eras left deep scars.