Each year, Sept. 30 marks Orange Shirt Day, a day when people wear the color in remembrance of federal Native American boarding school policies that forced thousands of children from their homes.
The day began in Canada to honor Indigenous children sent to residential schools. In recent years, American Indian and Alaska Native communities in the United States have also recognized the day in solidarity.
Boarding schools in Oregon
Federal boarding schools were part of U.S. policy for well over a century. For generations, hundreds of boarding schools across the country housed tens of thousands of children.
These schools removed children from their families and worked to suppress their languages, religions and cultural practices in an official policy of forced assimilation…