BILLINGS — This time of year marks a dark time in our nation's history and in Montana’s hidden history as young Indigenous children were taken away from their families to residential boarding schools by the U.S. government in an attempt to assimilate and strip away their culture.
A new mural in Billings, painted on the sides of the tunnel under Zimmerman Trail, along the city’s new Skyline Trail, depicts a young girl in an orange elk tooth dress. The color orange is significant for the Every Child Matters movement and for Orange Shirt Day, which is Sept. 30, the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.
The mural is painted by Charlene Sleeper, an Indigenous artist and MMIP advocate.
Orange is a color of solidarity, as descendants of boarding schools stand strong, working to gain their culture and native languages back while spreading knowledge about the devastating history their ancestors went through, many of whom died at the boarding schools and were severely mistreated. Some even faced corporal punishment, as Sleeper tells the story of her great-grandmother.
“Every Indigenous person you meet in America is going to have a descendant of someone that was subjected to the residential boarding school era,” says Sleeper. “We don’t know if she intentionally or unintentionally decided to speak her language, and she was punished for that. They used a very abusive form of corporal punishment. They put her in a chicken coop and only gave her bread and water for days, and she had to kneel down and crouch in this chicken coop.”
It is because of this treatment and the entire loss of language and cultures that you’ll see people across the United States and Canada wearing orange on Sept. 30, the bright color of solidarity. Even colleges like MSU-Billings can be seen tabling in the student union, handing out orange accessories, like handmade ribbons with dyed porcupine quills and hair ties, all to start a conversation about Orange Shirt Day, or the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.
“A lot of people don’t know or understand what it is about (Orange Shirt Day) and especially with a high native population in Montana and at MSU-B, I thought it would be a really good chance for us to have more people understand what we’ve been through and what we are still going through,” says Ricki Campbell, a member of the MSU-Billing All Nations Club Executive Team.
Ricki Campbell is from Wolf Point and an enrolled member of the Fort Peck Tribe.
“Even though I grew up on the reservation I wasn't connected to my culture at all. I didn't really learn anything, of course I went to the pow-wow, but I didn’t dance, I wasn’t taught how to dance. I feel that is the main takeaway from that is just kind of a loss of sense of self,” says Campbell.
For Sleeper, she honors her great-grandmother, Buffalo Calf Woman, through her new Skyline Trail mural, celebrating her bloodline’s survival, as her grandmother escaped the boarding school, but not before her name was Americanized.
“When she was forced into that school they changed her name to Olive Shoulder Blade,” says Sleeper.
That's why Sleeper painted her young great-grandmother in an orange dress, the buffalo and the calf for Buffalo Calf Woman and all the other indigenous children impacted to this day.
