A large number of Sitkans will be participating in an annual celebration that was first observed in Canada but is significant for Alaskans.
Orange Shirt Day started as a day to commemorate Indigenous youngsters who’d been removed from families, and then sent away to schools for residential students in Canada However, the celebration has expanded to include First Nations across the United States.
Lillian Young, with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, stated that Orange Shirt Day commemorates surprisingly the past.
“In 1973 the year 1973, in 1973, when Phyllis Jack Webstad was 6 years old, she was taken into the school for missionaries in Williams Lake, British Columbia,” Young said. “Her first impression from her very first morning at the mission school was of her clothes being removed, including an orange-colored shirt that was handed the girl by her grandma.”
Young stated that Webstad was at a reunion of his school St. Joseph Mission School in 2013 and told the story. Then, Orange Shirt Day was born.
As per the Massachusetts-based non-profit Cultural Survival, around 150,000 Indigenous children attended 130 school boarding houses across Canada The last of that was closed just 27 years ago, in the year 1996.
In the 1800s through the 1960s in the 1900s to the 1960s, United States operated more boarding schools than Canada and had less students overall. Cultural Survival estimates that 35,000 students attended boarding schools run through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and 15,000 went to BIA days schools.
The story of Phyllis Webstad is now seen as a symbol of the cultural deprivation that occurred in the schools that were a part of residential in both countries, as well as other emotional and physical abuses that included the undocumented deaths and burials of students.
Lillian Young said the only method to gain knowledge from this past is to confront it.
“As difficult as it might be for some to understand the importance of residential schools and our common colonial heritage, it’s vital to recognize and acknowledge these issues within the context of continuing learning and reconciliation” she added.
Orange Shirt Day is officially on Saturday, September. 30th, but Sitka will celebrate it on Friday at noon by a parade through the downtown. The organizers have made a customized orange t-shirt for the celebration and will distribute it for the very first hundred people to gather for the parade.
Chuck Miller, cultural liaison for Chuck Miller, cultural liaison for the Sitka Tribe, said the shirt is significant to the tribe’s culture. The shirt was designed by a local student. artwork. On the front, he wrote that they write X’atulitseen Yatx’iwhich means “We are proud of our children,” and beneath that, they read Haa Ani — “The Land of Our People, The Land of the Lingit.”
