Recently, September 30 has come to be known as the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools, taking a long overdue cue from our neighbors to the north. In Canada, Orange Shirt Day began in 2013 and in 2021 the Canadian government officially recognized it as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. 

This day is more important than ever this year. In July, the Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the release of the second and final volume of the investigative report called for in the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The report details the atrocities committed at 417 Indian boarding schools that had funding from the federal government including 17 in WA state between 1819 through the 1970s, and confirmed the deaths of at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children at these schools. The report includes recommendations on next steps to “support a path to healing the nation.”

In the announcement, Assistant Secretary Newland says, “For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children. This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations – that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways. It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy.”  

Coast Salish tribal members, including those from the Duwamish, experienced these schools and bear the legacies of their experiences. We must recognize their pain, acknowledge that this ancestral trauma is real and present today, and advocate for the government to make good on the recommendations in their report.

(Photo: Coast Salish ceremony, by Susan Fried)