"When I went to boarding school, I was 7," said Ramona Klein, speaking to a group clad in orange shirts at a vigil earlier this month in Washington, D.C. "My parents didn't see me — other than a little while during the summer — for four years. Some parents didn't see their children for 12 years."

Klein attended the Fort Totten Indian Industrial School in North Dakota from 1954 to 1958. She said being cut off from her family was just one of the many hardships she faced as a student at a federal Indian boarding school, in addition to abuse and neglect.

She and many others will be marking Orange Shirt Day at events around the country on Tuesday, in remembrance of the tens of thousands of Native children who attended these schools, the goal of which was to " kill the Indian … save the man

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