Freshman Assembly: Orange Shirt Day
Last week many teachers honored Orange Shirt Day to remember Native American students and how they were forced into boarding schools to assimilate into white communities. The freshman class had an assembly hosted by Father David Bailey to talk about how as a Catholic school what can we do to ensure Native American children are never treated like that again.
Father Bailey talked about how in the 1800s Canada and the U.S. had many military style boarding schools for Native American children to “irradiate their culture."
Orange shirt day symbolizes how Phillys Webster, a Native American girl, refused to give up her favorite shirt when taken to a boarding school. All the children's’ cultural expressions were stripped away from them, it was a cultural genocide according to Father Bailey. Although not all schools were as violent, they still took away the children’s way to express themselves. Father Bailey talked about how the trauma has been passed down through generations and how in many cases children never came back home, they passed away in the schools “killed by neglect.
As part of the Lasallian community, one of our schools service trips is in Blackfeet, Montana working at the De La Salle Blackfeet School in a Native American reservation. Students who participated in this trip this past summer shared their experience and talked about the impact it had on them. They talked about how welcoming and fun the kids were and how they shared their traumas and dreams. It was an eye opening experience that created bonds that would last forever, and more than doing service they were creating friendships.
