Orange Shirt Day stems from the childhood experience of residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad.
“Phyllis Webstad was taken at the age of six to a mission school, and her grandmother purchased her an orange shirt for that day of school,” said S’eiltin Jamiann Hasselquist, a member of the Juneau Tlingit and Haida Community Council.
Hasselquist explained the origins of the day on Juneau Afternoon earlier this week.
“When she went to that institution, her orange shirt was taken,” she said. “Her hair was cut. She never saw that orange shirt again.”
The story symbolizes the ways residential schools in the U.S. and Canada stripped Indigenous people of their language and culture. The schools were also often the sites of horrific abuse to Indigenous children.
Alaska had more than 100 residential schools from the late 1800s until the 1970s. They were run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and church groups, and often banned children from speaking Native languages.
Today, boarding school survivors and supporters of Alaska Native language and culture revitalization wear orange shirts in memory of this colonial history.
Megan Lingle is with Tlingit & Haida’s Community & Behavioral Services Healing Center.
She said this year the remains of four Alaska Native youth who died in Pennsylvania at Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School are being repatriated to their communities. Here she is on Juneau Afternoon earlier this month.
“So when we think about Orange Shirt Day, it’s more than a century later, and these families and tribes are still bringing their children home,” Lingle said. “And when we say every child matters, that is what those words mean.”
For the first time, Tlingit and Haida is hosting a joint Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and Orange Shirt Day walk and run. Lingle said participants can walk or run a 5K or a 1K at Savikko Park on Douglas. The event starts at 10 a.m. Sunday.
“I thought, what better way to bring our community together than in nature?” Lingle said.
On Sunday at 1 p.m., Tlingit and Haida Community Council is hosting a potluck at the community hall near Salmon Creek. Participants can pick up a free orange T-shirt to wear on Wednesday, Orange Shirt Day.
Sealaska Heritage Institute Director Kaaháni Rosita Worl will speak about her experiences surviving being forcibly taken to a residential school in Haines, according to Hasselquist.
Then at 4 p.m., the council will hosting a free screening of the film Bones of Crows — about a Cree woman surviving the boarding school system in Canada — at the Aurora Grand Theater in downtown Juneau.
In Juneau schools, like Kax̱dig̱oowu Héen Elementary, students are recognizing the day with schoolwide art projects and lessons tailored to their age groups.
Davin Savikko is a librarian and art teacher at Kax̱dig̱oowu Héen and he says the school uses cultural context to talk about Orange Shirt Day.
“Our focus is on the concept of wooch yáx̱, like balance, which is a Lingít value, and recognizing that there in the past has been an organized, like forced disruption of balance,” Savikko said. “So we talk about foods, languages, family, place, and how these things were disrupted.”
Then, they take that concept and apply it to a project the school takes on all together.
“And so, as a school, it’s our job to find these small experiences through learning, through arts that every child in our school can be a part of,” he said. “And then when we combine these into pieces of art with every student, we create this big thing as a whole.”
Also on Wednesday afternoon, Haa Tóoch Lichéesh Coalition is partnering with the Zach Gordon Youth Center and many other organizations to host an event with traditional food and healing activities. That’s at the ZGYC from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.
The event is open to all as a space to “heal, grieve, and celebrate.” Attendees can make buttons, block print an Orange Shirt Day design, and learn about traditional medicine.
