On September 30 each year, people across North America wear orange to honor Indigenous children taken from their families to residential and boarding schools, including those who never came home, and the survivors and families who live with that history today.
The film “Ghosts” focuses on three Kiowa children who escaped a government boarding school in the winter of 1891 and died from the cold.
The day began with a single shirt. In 1973, 6-year-old Phyllis Webstad, of the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation, arrived at St. Joseph’s Mission residential school near Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada, wearing a bright orange shirt her grandmother had bought her. It was taken from her on arrival, and she never wore it again. Webstad shared her story publicly in 2013, and Orange Shirt Day, with its message “Every Child Matters,” grew from it. Canada has observed September 30 as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation since 2021.
In the United States, the history is only more recently being formally acknowledged. In October 2024, at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, President Joe Biden issued the federal government’s first formal apology for the Indian boarding school system, which for roughly 150 years separated Native children from their families, languages and cultures. He called the policy “a sin on our soul.”
For many members of the Cornell community, this history is not abstract. “It is family history, carried in their hearts,” said Kurt Jordan, interim faculty director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) and professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “And while Indigenous communities are far more than the harms inflicted upon them, honoring that strength means facing the truth of what happened, not looking away from it. Watching these films can be a meaningful way to listen, and we encourage viewers to approach them with care: to center Indigenous voices, to be mindful that some content is difficult, and to give themselves and others space.”
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
