RED LAKE — Thousands participated in Orange Shirt Day across the U.S. and Canada Wednesday, Sept. 30.
Known as Truth and Reconciliation Day across the border, the event encourages people wear orange shirts to represent a traumatic moment of 6-year-old Phyllis Webster’s life: the day the First Nations girl arrived at the St. Joseph Mission, a residential boarding school, in 1973.
“She had a brand-new orange shirt that she was really proud of, because they never had new clothes back then,” said Donovan May, a sixth grade teacher at Endazhi Nitaawiging, Red Lake’s charter school for kindergartners up to eighth graders.
“One of the very first things they did is they took all her clothes away.”
May was one of at least 100 who donned an orange shirt and walked along Highway 1 in honor of all children who attended residential boarding schools, and in memory of those who never made it home.
May said his grandfather also attended a boarding school. May recalled pressing his grandfather on why he didn’t teach them Ojibwe, despite being a first-language speaker. May said he learned his grandfather was punished at school for speaking it.
“He thought he was protecting his children so that they didn't have to endure some of the things that he did because he was speaking Ojibwe," May said, “not understanding that was part of who their very being is, and what they need in order to find that healing within themselves.”
Residential boarding school survivor accounts describe punishments such as beatings and being made to chew on lye soap for speaking Indigenous languages. Epidemics like measles, typhoid and mumps frequently swept through the overcrowded dormitories, and some schools even had cells or dungeons to confine students.
Many students never returned to their home communities. Those who did return often struggled with reconnection to their Indigenous identity — a result of the “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” mantra behind the residential boarding school system.
The first boarding school in Minnesota operated for 50 years on White Earth beginning in 1871. The Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict made a formal apology to the White Earth Nation in 2021. In Red Lake, St. Mary’s Mission operated a residential school from 1888 until 1940. It transitioned to offering a day-only school, which still operates today. The Benedictine nuns left the Mission in 2009. St. Mary’s is now part of the Crookston Diocese.
May said undoing the harms of the residential boarding school system is underway in Red Lake.
"That old man used to always say, ‘Don't look for change in your lifetime.’ But I can see a lot of change in my lifetime because ... when I was these kids' age, I don't remember people speaking Ojibwe. I don't remember them talking about ceremonies or anything like that,” he said. “Now, it's everywhere you go in Red Lake.”
Endazhi Nitaawiging’s remembrance ceremony was one of many Orange Shirt Day events hosted across schools and communities in Northern Minnesota on Wednesday, including at St. Mary’s.
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