The campus of Faith Lutheran Church is located on the traditional and current territories of the Coast Salish nations, specifically the Squaxin Island and Skokomish peoples. Shelton and the South Puget Sound are covered by the Treaty of Medicine Creek, which was signed under duress in 1854.

We thank our Indigenous neighbors for their care of this land we now share and resolve to work with them for the health and wellbeing of this area and all who call it home.

What is the orange banner about?

Rev. Brenda Satrum

(Updated September 30, 2023)

In the summer of 2021, the remains of 215 bodies were found outside a boarding school for Indigenous children in Kamloops, B.C., even as the remains of 9 children were repatriated to the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota from a boarding school in Pennsylvania. We are faced with the reality that for nearly 100 years the U.S. government and white settlers forcibly removed children from their families in order to assimilate them into white, “good Christian” culture. Our Native American and Alaskan Native neighbors still suffer deeply from the scars of this trauma and its lasting effects on their individual and community wellbeing.

Faith Lutheran Church is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), whose Northern European forebears settled across the Great Plains and into the Pacific Northwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, displacing the tribal residents of the lands we homesteaded. But we also made friends: members of tribal peoples joined our congregations. And in 2021 the ELCA American Indian/Alaska Native Lutheran Association asked ELCA churches to hang orange banners in sanctuaries or other prominent places to recognize, remember, and honor the lives of children lost to the boarding school system, the generational trauma incurred by this sin, and our commitment to learn from the past and make amends as best we are able.

Faith’s orange banner features the handprints of our members and words that express our commitment to listen, lament, and love our Indigenous Neighbors. We hung it on Reformation Day 2021 and kept it up through June 2022—a bit more than one day for each child found or returned the prior summer. It now hangs in the Café, along with a description of its significance.

Our banner’s design was inspired by the University of Victoria’s 2021 Orange Shirt Day “Heart and Hands” emblem, created by Carey Newman, Impact Chair of Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, B.C.

Newman writes:

This design was made to honour the children who died in residential schools. The hearts express love for all those in unmarked graves and compassion for the families and communities who waited for them to be found. The small and colourful hands remind us of the uniqueness and beauty of every child. Taken together, they represent our commitment to listen to our hearts and use our hands to do the work that needs to be done.

The visceral confirmation of Survivor accounts that has come from locating these graves has affected many of us on an emotional level. It has changed the way that many people think and feel about our histories and current realities in Canada.

Artist Carey Newman, Hayalthkin’geme (Kwakwaka’wakw/Coast Salish) on “Hearts and Hands”

Thank you, friends of Faith, for your kind hearts and willing hands to do the work of honest faith and healing that our neighbors are asking of us!

God bless,

Rev. Brenda Satrum