At its September meeting, the Virginia Synod Council formally received the July 2021 letter from the ELCA American Indian Alaska Native Lutheran Association (ELCA AIAN), calling on this church to Remember the Children. The ELCA AIAN shared a letter in July 2021, to the whole of the ELCA regarding “the news of 215+ children of the Kamloops Residential School whose remains were recently found in a mass grave and of the children of the Rosebud Sioux whose bodies were returned to their homeland.” [View the full letter “Remembering the Children” linked here as a PDF.]
In their letter, the ELCA AIAN requested that the church (all of us in the ELCA) take several actions:
- “…hang an orange banner in the sanctuaries of your churches for 225 days” – in solidarity with Indigenous people throughout North America and in remembrance and lament of Native children that never made it out of residential schools.
- “Please grieve with us and remember us as the Indigenous people of this land who are going through a very sad and heartbreaking time in our collective psyche.”
- “We now call on the Church to acknowledge and confess its complicity in all the atrocities committed against the Indigenous peoples of North America and throughout the world where western Christianity colonized Indigenous peoples. Please stand in partnership with us for the children.”
The Council also moved to take these actions:
- Participate in observance of the Day of Remembrance (Orange Shirt Day) on September 30 – remembering the thousands of children who were victims of and traumatized by Native American boarding schools in the US and Canada.
- Engage in sacred remembrance and continue to take steps of lamentation, confession, reconciliation, and healing – as we “learn more, do more, and realize healing and justice for the Indigenous peoples whose lands we now occupy.” (ELCA Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations Land Acknowledgement Guide)
- Invite congregations in the Synod to join in observance of the Day of Remembrance and in their own sacred remembrance.
Resources regarding the Day of Remembrance (shared by Vance Blackfox [Director for Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations with the ELCA])
- ELCA Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations
- SEPTEMBER 30 – NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR U.S. INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS
- Information about the origins of Orange Shirt Day, as well as printable logos for newsletters or bulletin inserts
Day of Remembrance T-shirts from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
