U.S. President Joe Biden said he will formally apologize on Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, where many were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused and nearly 1,000 died.
“I’m doing something I should have done a long time ago: To make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Biden said as he left the White House on Thursday for Arizona.
“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”
Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system shortly after she became the first Native American to lead the Interior Department. It found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as 4 — were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to dispossess tribal nations of their land.
The investigation also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — during the more than 150 years when the U.S. government worked to decimate Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples.
The Interior Department conducted listening sessions and gathered the testimony of survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgement of and apology for the boarding school era. Haaland said she took that to Biden, who agreed that it was necessary.
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The White House said Biden believes that “to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past.”
“In making this apology, the President acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated,” its statement said.
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.
Haaland will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix. It comes as the Harris campaign spends hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting Native American voters in battleground states including Arizona and North Carolina.
“It will be one of the high points of my entire life,” Haaland said.
It’s unclear what, if any, action will follow the apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands. Some tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army, which has refused to follow federal law regulating the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
“President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact.”
Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action from the federal government, because it’s an acknowledgement of past wrongs left unrectified, something “known and buried,” said Melissa Nobles, chancellor of MIT and author of “The Politics of Official Apologies.”
“These things have value because it validates the experiences of the survivors and acknowledges they’ve been seen and we heard you, and also there’s a lot of historical evidence to suggest this happened,” Nobles said.
Canada has a similar history of subjugating Indigenous peoples and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
“I am deeply sorry,” Francis said to school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered in Alberta. He called the school policy a “disastrous error” that was incompatible with the Gospel. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Francis said.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century prior. In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for his government’s past policies of assimilation, including the forced removal of children. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a similar concession in 2022.
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Hoskin said he is grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading the effort to reckon with the country’s role in a dark chapter for Indigenous peoples, but he emphasized that the apology is just “an important step, which must be followed by continued action.”
“This is a beautiful beginning to see the honoring of these children whose stories were never told,” said Deborah Parker, CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which worked on the Interior Department. Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes, hopes this acknowledgement will lead to many more steps to address the needs of impacted Native communities.
—Associated Press writer Peter Smith in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Josh Boak at the White House contributed to this report.
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