President Biden apologizes for 150-year-old Indian residential school policy

NORMAN, Okla. — President Joe Biden said he would formally apologize on Friday for the country’s role in forcing Native children into residential schools for more than 150 years, where many of them suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse and more than 950 died.

“I’m doing something I should have done a long time ago: to formally apologize to the Indian Nations for the way we have treated their children for so many years,” Biden said Thursday as he left the White House for Arizona.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the residential school system shortly after becoming the first Native American to lead the agency, and she will join Biden on his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president when he delivers a speech Friday at the Gila River Indian community outside Phoenix.

“I never in a million years would have thought something like this would happen,” Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “It’s a big deal for me. I’m sure this will be a big deal for all of Indian Country.”

The investigation she initiated found that at least 18,000 children – some as young as 4 – had been taken from their parents and forced to attend schools designed to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to expropriate tribal nations from their land.

The investigation documented 973 deaths – though the number is believed to be probably higher – and 74 graves linked to more than 500 schools.

No president has ever formally apologized for the forcible removal of these children – which constitutes genocide under the United Nations – or for the U.S. government’s actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian people.

The Department of Internal Affairs conducted interviews and collected testimonies from survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was to acknowledge and apologize for the boarding school era. Haaland said she conveyed it to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.

“By apologizing, the President acknowledges that as a people who love our country, we must remember and teach all of our history, even if it is painful. We must learn from this history so that it never repeats itself,” the White House said in a statement.

The policy of forced assimilation begun by Congress in 1819 as an attempt to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 with the passage of a sweeping law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which focused primarily on allowing tribes to decide who would adopt their children. kids.

Biden and Haaland’s visit to the Gila River Indian community comes as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting Native Americans in battleground states including Arizona and North Carolina.

“This will be one of the most important moments of my life,” Haaland said of Biden’s Friday apology.

It is unclear what action, if any, will be taken following the apology. The Department of the Interior continues to work with tribal nations to repatriate children’s remains to federal lands. Some tribes remain in conflict with the U.S. military, which has refused to abide by federal law governing the return of Native American remains for those still buried at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

“President Biden’s apology is an important moment for Native people across the country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to the AP.

“Our children were created to live in a world that has erased their identity, their culture and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools attended by thousands of our Cherokee children. To this day, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation feels its impact in some way.”

Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations that continue to press for further action from the federal government, said Melissa Nobles, MIT chancellor and author of “The Politics of Officer Apologies.”

“These things have value because they validate survivors’ experiences and confirm that someone saw them,” Nobles said.

The U.S. government has apologized for other historical injustices, including against Japanese families imprisoned during World War II. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to compensate tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a bill apologizing to Native Hawaiians for overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.

In 2008 and 2009, the House and Senate passed resolutions apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But these gestures did not pave the way for reparations for Black Americans.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating First Nations and forcing their children into residential schools to assimilate, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology in 2008. There was also a truth and reconciliation process, and later plans to inject billions of dollars into communities devastated by government policies.

In 2022, Pope Francis, in a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s Indigenous residential school policy, stated that the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into Christian society had destroyed their culture, broken up families and marginalized generations.

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples,” Francis said.

In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for his government’s past assimilation policies, including the forced removal of children. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a similar concession in 2022.

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 people. However, he stressed that the apology is only “an important step that must be followed by further action.”