Orange Shirt Day observed

NETT LAKE- Nearly 100 Bois Forte band members turned out on Monday for a ceremony and walk to remember and honor the Indigenous people who were forced to attend residential schools in the U.S. and Canada in the 1800s and 1900s.
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, also known as Orange Shirt Day, was established in Canada in 2013 in concert with the efforts of a national commission that spent seven years documenting the attempt to forcefully assimilate Indigenous cultures in government-funded, church-operated residential schools in Canada. The Canadian Parliament elevated the day to a national holiday in 2021. A bill designating a similar day in the U.S. is currently being considered in Congress.
Orange Shirt Day takes its name from the story of Phyllis Webstad, a survivor of the St. Joseph Mission School in Canada. As the author and activist tells the story, on her first day of residential school as a six-year-old she was stripped of her clothes, including a new orange shirt her grandmother bought her that was never returned. The orange shirt represents the efforts made by residential schools to deny children their Indigenous identities.
The Vermilion Lake Indian School, located on Sucker Point, where the Bois Forte offices and health facilities are found today, opened in 1899 and after transitioning to a day school in the 1920s ran through 1953. The government also operated a day school at Nett Lake, and some Bois Forte children were enrolled in other residential schools around the state.
The ceremonies at Nett Lake were live streamed so that members in the Vermilion sector could participate as well. Representing the day’s regular catch phrase “Every Child Matters,” the children who attend Nett Lake School were there at the tribal government center to take part in the observance.
A drum circle sang several songs, and spiritual advisor Vern Adams gave an invocation and then related stories about a relative who had been forced to attend a residential school. Afterward, the 80 or so in attendance at Nett Lake filed out of the building to walk the approximately one-mile route along Lakeshore Dr.