09/30/2026
Today is the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools (also known as Orange Shirt Day).
Before there were government reports, investigations, apologies, or national observances, there were children. They had their own names. They belonged to families, communities, homelands, and Tribal Nations. They carried languages, cultures, spiritual practices, knowledge, relationships, and teachings passed down from one generation to the next.
They did not arrive at boarding schools without knowledge or teachers. Their families were their first teachers. Their communities held knowledge. Their languages carried memory. Their homelands taught relationship and responsibility.
Then children were taken from those circles and placed within a system intended to change who they were. They were somebody’s babies. That truth must remain at the center of everything we teach about Indian boarding schools.
A HISTORY WE MUST KNOW
Beginning in the 19th century, the United States enacted laws and policies that established and supported a federal Indian boarding-school system. Children were removed from their families and communities and placed in institutions designed to assimilate them into the dominant society.
This was not simply an educational system in which terrible things happened.
The federal government’s own investigation found that Indian boarding-school policy was part of a broader effort to forcibly assimilate Native children and dispossess Native peoples of their territories. The government funded, operated, supported, and oversaw schools across generations.
Religious institutions and organizations also operated or supported many schools, sometimes receiving federal money for Native children placed in their care.
The scale matters.
The Department of the Interior identified 417 federally operated or supported Indian boarding schools across 37 states or then-territories in the system it investigated.
The Department also estimated that the United States made more than $23.3 billion in 2023 inflation-adjusted appropriations between 1871 and 1969 for the federal boarding-school system, other similar institutions, and associated assimilation policies.
This was not the work of a few isolated schools. It was sustained across generations by government policy, institutional authority, and public money.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition—NABS—uses a broader research framework. Its research identifies 526 known Indian boarding schools in the United States, and that research continues as additional records are located.
Children were separated from their families and sometimes sent hundreds or thousands of miles from everything and everyone they knew. Their hair was cut. Their clothing and belongings could be taken. Native names were replaced with English or Christian names. Children were punished for speaking their languages and practicing their cultures and spiritual ways.
Some children never came home.
