President Joe Biden issued a heartfelt and historic apology on Friday for one of the United States’ “most horrific chapters”: the forced removal of Native American children from their families and their placement in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their cultures.
From 1819 to the 1970s, the US operated hundreds of Indian boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including the forced conversion to Christianity.
A recent government report uncovered shocking accounts of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, with nearly 1,000 children estimated to have died though the actual number is believed to be much higher.
“I formally apologize, as president of the United States, for what we did,” Biden declared in a speech filled with passion and emotion, addressing the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona.
He described the 150 years of the school system as one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and labeled it a “sin on our soul.”
Biden acknowledged that no apology could fully compensate for the losses endured during the federal boarding school policy, stating, “Today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
Joining him was US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a cabinet position, who shared her personal connection to the issue, recalling how her maternal grandparents were taken from their communities and forced into a Catholic school.
She asserted that federal authorities “failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways,” and emphasized, “In spite of everything that has happened, we are still here!”
The Biden administration has made significant investments in Native American communities, taking executive actions to enhance Tribal autonomy, prioritize gender-based violence, and protect sacred ancestral sites.
This apology comes in the wake of similar formal acknowledgments in Canada and other countries, where historical abuses against Indigenous populations are increasingly being recognized.
In total, more than 400 boarding schools, often run by churches, were established across 37 states or territories. Native children were forcibly taken under policies described by activists as cultural genocide, encapsulated in the brutal motto, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Emerson Gorman, a Navajo elder, recounted being taken from his family at just five years old and subjected to harsh rules at the boarding school, where he was forbidden to speak his language and pressured to convert to Catholicism.
Official apologies for past wrongdoings in the US are rare. Previous notable apologies include President Ronald Reagan’s in 1988 for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, President Bill Clinton’s in 1997 for the Tuskegee Experiment, and the House of Representatives’ apology in 2008 for slavery and Jim Crow laws, although these congressional apologies did not include reparations for descendants of slaves.
