La Conner Schools has outdoor celebration of Orange Shirt Day

Orange is a color that has long linked the La Conner and Swinomish communities, perhaps never more so than now, 66 years after the Rainbow Bridge was built.

That was much in evidence Friday afternoon when La Conner students, most wearing bright orange shirts bearing the phrase "Every Child Matters," gathered at Whittaker Field to pay homage to victims and survivors of the Indian Residential School era.

Superintendent Will Nelson, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, said the annual fall event promotes awareness of the residential school system in place in the U.S. and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries. It continues to impact tribes today.

Nelson termed the 30-minute remembrance ceremony "very powerful," and praised the solemn, spiritual performances of the Swinomish Canoe Family, whose drumming and singing was highlighted by tribal youth and La Conner students dancing on the stadium track.

"You all give us hope for the future," Nelson told the dancers.

Orange Shirt Day, which is observed across North America, has a local connection beyond the La Conner Schools focus.

La Conner alum Dr. Kisha Supernant, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta, has headed up the effort to locate unmarked graves of those tribal children who died while attending residential schools in western Canada.

Schools on both sides of the border were developed to assimilate Native children, teaching them Euro-American history and cuture while stripping them of their own language, customs, music and traditions.

Canadian Phyllis Jack Webstad created and inspired Sept. 30 as Orange Shirt Day. The observance here was moved to Sept. 29, a Friday, so that La Conner students who had been studying the residential school period could participate in a campus program.

"Part of my job," said campus Community and Cultural Liaison Clarissa Williams, "is to make sure we have this day of remembrance on our calendar."

Williams noted that about 40 per cent of the student population identifies as Native American.

"So, it's really important that we honor this day," she said.

La Conner Schools was fully on board with that, lining up student speakers – including reigning Miss Swinomish Kialah Seymour – to share their family lineages.

Swinomish elders served as special guests, most attending in the Whittaker Field home bleachers, though tribal senator Barb James stood on the track with Canoe Family members.

The orange shirt was chosen to symbolize residential school remembrances because of a traumatic event in Webstad's life. As a youth she was forced to give up a favorite gifted orange shirt upon arrival at the residential school near Williams Lake, British Columbia.

The color orange over time reminded Webstad of her experience and how her feelings as a six-year-old away from home did not matter to the residential school staff. But rather than invoking bitter memories, the orange shirt today fuels desires for truth and reconciliation.

Both, of course, remain works in progress – thus the designation of Orange Shirt Day as an ongoing annual event.

Or, as Webstad often explains: "The truth is not yet fully told."