President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned, historic apology Friday for one of the United States’ “most horrific chapters”: ripping Native American children from their families and putting them in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their culture.
From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity.
A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with the estimated deaths of nearly 1,000 children — with the true figure thought to be considerably higher.
“I formally apologize, as president of the United States, for what we did,” he said in a speech that alternated between fiery and deeply emotional, addressing the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona.
He added the roughly 150 years the school system existed were one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and a “sin on our soul.”
“I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” he continued. “Today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
Biden was briefly interrupted by a protester denouncing civilian casualties in the Gaza conflict, where the United States serves as Israel’s primary arms supplier — but he told the crowd to let her speak.
“There’s a lot of innocent people being killed, and it has to stop,” he said.
Biden was joined by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, who struck a defiant tone as she recalled her own maternal grandparents “were stolen from their communities and forced to live in a Catholic school.”
Federal authorities “failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways,” she continued. “In spite of everything that has happened, we are still here!”
The Biden administration has invested significantly in Native American communities, with executive actions expanding Tribal autonomy, directing agencies to prioritize gender-based violence, designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites, and more.
The apology follows formal declarations in Canada, where thousands of children died at similar boarding schools, and other countries around the world where historic abuses of Indigenous populations are increasingly being recognized.
Hard to say sorry
In all, there were more than 400 schools, often church-run, across 37 states or then-territories.
Native children were forcibly taken under a policy of what activists call cultural genocide to “civilize” them, a brutal agenda summed up in the phrase “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Emerson Gorman, a Navajo Nation elder and healer, told AFP in a 2020 interview that he was taken from his family at just five years old.
At the boarding school, boys were forced to cut their long braids, forbidden to speak their language, told their religion was “evil,” and pressured to convert to Catholicism.
Official apologies for the nation’s past wrongdoings are rare.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation to compensate over 100,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II.
President Bill Clinton in 1997 formally apologized for the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of the mid-20th century where hundreds of Black men were intentionally left untreated for syphilis to learn how the disease progresses.
In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, where the United States dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945, although he stopped short of a formal apology.
And in 2008, the US House of Representatives apologized for 246 years of African American slavery and the racist Jim Crow laws that followed. The Senate passed a similar resolution the next year.
But the congressional apologies did not include reparations to the descendants of slaves.