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

Graham Lee Brewer, Associated Press

NORMAN, Okla. — President Joe Biden is scheduled to formally apologize on Friday for the role he played in the country Indian residential school systemthat has devastated the lives of generations of indigenous children and their ancestors.

“I never thought something like this would happen,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna. “It’s a big deal for me. I’m sure this will be a big deal for all of Indian Country.”

Shortly after becoming the first Native American to lead Home Affairs, Haaland launched a campaign investigation to the residential school system, which 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 in order to dispossess their tribal nations of their land. Nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 graves have also been documented associated with more than 500 schools, including those in Pennsylvania. Cumberland County.

No president has ever formally apologized for the forcible abduction of Native American, Alaska Native and Hawaiian children – which constitutes genocide under the United Nations definition – or for any other aspect of the U.S. government’s decimation of indigenous peoples.

• READ ALSO: ‘Peace and closure’: Remains of Native American children from Carlisle to be returned to families

The second phase of the investigation was carried out by the Ministry of Interior listening sessions and collected certificate 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.

Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend residential school, said she was honored to have helped make the apology a reality with her staff. Haaland will join Biden on his first diplomatic visit as president on Friday, when he will deliver a speech. “This will be one of the most important moments in my life,” she said.

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, and many tribes remain at odds with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has refused to follow federal law governing the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

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

“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. “There were 87 boarding schools in Oklahoma, 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 because it is an acknowledgment of uncorrected past mistakes, something “known and buried,” said Melissa Nobles, MIT chancellor and author of “The Politics.” “official apology”.

“These things have value because they corroborate the survivors’ experiences and confirm that they were seen and heard, and there is a lot of historical evidence to suggest that this happened,” Nobles said.

• READ ALSO: A Nebraska tribe is suing the U.S. military over the burial of native children in central Pa.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating indigenous peoples and forcing their children into residential schools to assimilate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 2017 apology was followed by the establishment of a truth and reconciliation process and the infusion of billions of dollars into First Nations to deal with the devastation left by government policies.

There is no such commission in the USA. A bill establishing a truth and reconciliation process was introduced last year by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but remains in the Senate.

In 2022, Pope Francis, in a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “disastrous” 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 am very sorry,” Francis said to school survivors and indigenous community members gathered in Alberta. He called the school’s policy a “catastrophic mistake” that is inconsistent with the Gospel. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples,” Francis said.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a bill apologizing to Native Hawaiians for overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier. 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 think with the country’s role in a dark chapter for indigenous people, but stressed that the apology is only “an important step that must be followed by further action.”