Shawnee Tribe Commemorates Orange Shirt Day at Shawnee Mission

FAIRWAY, Kan., Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Shawnee Tribe and its Chief Ben Barnes commemorated "Orange Shirt Day," at the Shawnee Indian Mission to encourage comprehensive federal investigation into all residential boarding schools and honor the Native American children who were taken and often died at residential schools beginning in the 19th century. Orange Shirt Day began in Canada in 2013 to remember the thousands of Indigenous children killed at church-run residential schools. Tribal nations and advocates across America are adopting this movement to support thorough investigations of similar conditions at boarding schools in the US. Attached are key sections of Chief Barnes' remarks made at the press conference at the Shawnee Mission:

For far too long, the truth about Indian Boarding schools has been absent from national conversations. Others may have forgotten, but America's Tribal Nations have not. Survivors' stories have been handed down from generation to generation, and the stories of those who did not survive are coming to light.

So, this year, amidst a new era of national consciousness and willingness to address the consequences of history, the Shawnee Tribe is proud to embrace and adopt Orange Shirt Day. And on this day, we urge every American to honor boarding school survivors and the memory of the children who never made it home.

Last week, with assistance from the City, especially Shawnee Indian Mission Site Director Jennifer Laughlin, the Shawnee Tribe was able to bring in one of the premier architectural resource firms in the country to perform a deep assessment of the property and begin mapping out a plan for further restoration of the mission. We look forward to receiving, sharing and addressing the engineers' findings in the coming months. The Shawnee Tribe has also begun taking steps to explore the technological ins and outs of surveying and scanning the mission with ground penetrating radar and other geophysical techniques to uncover what history lies beneath our feet.

And while we are proud of the welcome we've received from local partners, the issue of Native American Boarding Schools far exceeds our collaborative work at this single site in Kansas. The federal government needs to step up and work alongside tribal nations to examine every location across this country.

We applaud President Biden and Interior Secretary Haaland's commitment to investigating this dark chapter in history, and we hope they intend to make it clear that the American project of assimilating Indigenous children through the guise of boarding school education began far earlier and endured far longer than most Americans realize.

I encourage the Biden administration to comprehensively examine every single residential school — those run by the federal government, like Carlisle, and those brokered by federal Indian Agents, like the Shawnee Indian Mission. Whatever the conditions at these schools, the children who attended any of these places deserve to be remembered, found, named, returned, and honored.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shawnee-tribe-commemorates-orange-shirt-day-at-shawnee-mission-301389030.html

SOURCE Shawnee Indian Tribe