Robbinsdale Area Schools

Join us: Honor Orange Shirt Day on Friday, Sept. 27

Join us: Honor Orange Shirt Day on Friday, Sept. 27
Orange Shirt Day

Community members are invited to join Robbinsdale American Indian Education in our Orange Shirt Day Remembrance Walk from 5 to 6 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 27, at East Medicine Lake Park, 1740 E. Medicine Lake Blvd. in Plymouth.

Orange Shirt Day, which officially takes place Monday, Sept. 30, is a day on which we commemorate the American Indian residential school experience and honor the healing journey of all affected. 

“Our Native relatives never had a choice in being removed from their homelands and family members," said Yvonne Strong, secretary of Rdale’s American Indian Parent Advisory Committee (AIPAC). "They were just pulled away from the only family and home life they knew and placed in strange surroundings.

"They were told to live the colonial way. It was traumatic," said Strong, who is also an enrolled member and elder in the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

Thanks to dogged research and dissemination, the general public is becoming more aware of the hundreds North American residential schools that strove to assimilate Indigenous children, often taking them against the will of their families. 

According to the New York Times in a 2023 article entitled ‘War Against the Children:’ 

The Native American boarding school system was vast and entrenched, ranging from small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to refurbished military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down both the West and East coasts.

Until recently, incomplete records and scant federal attention kept even the number of schools — let alone more details about how they functioned — unknown. The 523 schools represented here constitute the most comprehensive accounting to date of institutions involved in the system. This data was compiled over the course of several years by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy and research organization. It reflects the efforts of historians, researchers, activists and survivors who have filled in many of the blanks in this dark chapter of American history.

Wherever they were located or whoever ran them, the schools largely shared the mission of assimilating Indigenous students by erasing their culture. Children’s hair was cut off; their clothes were burned; they were given new, English names and were required to attend Christian religious services; and they were forced to perform manual labor, both on school premises and on surrounding farms. Those who dared to keep speaking their ancestral languages or observing their religious practices were often beaten.

“On Orange Shirt Day we honor and recognize the relatives and communities that the residential schools have impacted," said Strong.

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