Today is Orange Shirt Day, which commemorates Native children who were taken to Indian boarding and residential schools and recognizes the enduring harms those institutions caused. In Michigan, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe is showing that remembrance also means reclaiming the place where Indian boarding school policy was carried out and rebuilding the record to ensure the history can be understood.
The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School operated from 1893 to 1934, where federal assimilation policy targeted Indigenous languages, cultures, and spirituality. The Tribe’s history and timeline are here.
In 2011, the Tribe accepted conveyance of 8.86 acres containing six historic school buildings and Mission Creek Cemetery. It later secured National Register listing and is working toward restoring selected buildings for the Tribal Historic Preservation Office and a museum devoted to Indigenous history, research, and education. The Tribe’s account of the conveyance is here, and the preservation vision is here. Now, buildings once used to suppress Indigenous identity are being remade into Tribal institutions charged with preserving it.
The Tribe is also rebuilding the record. The Tribe’s Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways is creating a searchable digital archive of Mount Pleasant student records, and in 2026 the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded the Tribe $220,901 to digitize 37 more boxes of correspondence at the National Archives in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single publicly accessible Tribal repository. The Ziibiwing archive is here, and the 2026 IMLS grant description is here.
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