Orange Shirt Day
by Jesse Smith
… is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?
David Foster Wallace
September 30th is designated as Orange Shirt Day, which may be a new idea to many of you as it was for me in the last few years. It began only 13 years ago in British Columbia, Canada, and in 2021 was incorporated as part of the Canadian federal holiday named National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. The truth behind this holiday is that for roughly two centuries Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families, their homes, and their whole way of life and brought to residential schools that were interspersed all around Canada and the United States; the reconciliation is the conversations that come from the discussion of this truth. Orange Shirt Day was born out of a call to redirect our eyes to the ongoing reality that these schools created for First Nations and American Indian populations today. Here is the Orange Shirt Day Website website for further reading about the day itself.
Let's open the door into stories of realities that have been ignored, sometimes through ignorance and sometimes through narrative control. David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “Consider the Lobster” honors the difficulty that working through cognitive dissonance can be, and acknowledging the elephant that stands between our mind and reality can be stressful and inconvenient. The prevalence of westerns in popular media have left us with stories involving American Indians that left out the perspective of those most affected These narratives left little room for the voices of real 20th century Native Americans to be heard, leaving them silenced by the media and the residential schools themselves.
As a 27 year-old man from the Makah tribe, I grew up on the Makah Reservation in Northern Washington then moved south to Vancouver when I was 10 years old. Over the course of my public education, we learned about the Assimilation Act that took place in residential schools. However, the teachings of the Act and its treaties were impersonal and detached. My mother had siblings that were born in the 1950’s who were taken away to residential schools, but that part of history was not taught in my schools. I was well into adulthood when I learned about this and this shattered any sense of separation I felt from the severity and impact of these events. I am the first generation in my family to not experience residential schools. The history classes misconstrued the fight that tribes made in the American court system as a problem of yesterday and the message I received is that problems in the past must stay in the past. Many can choose to ignore these grim realities, but that is not a privilege that I have been allotted. The immediate damage done to these kids was obvious, but the dismantling of eight generations of parenting wisdom, traditions, and parenting skills is ongoing.
This is what has made it so difficult for Indigenous children across these generations to prosper. It’s hard to know what reconciliation will look like, it is up to each tribe and each locale to discuss and figure this out. How else can we elevate each tribe’s right to care for their own children? How can we reach a world where the gap between thought and reality is closed? How can one single person do anything to repair two centuries of contention?
On September 30th, I am going to wear an orange shirt and see what conversations come from it.
