Biden apologizes for atrocities at Native American boarding school

PHOENIX: US President Joe Biden on Friday (October 25) apologized for one of the “most terrible chapters in the country”: the abduction of Native American children from their families and placing them in government boarding schools in an attempt to erase their culture.

From the early 1800s through the 1970s, the United States operated hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to forcibly assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including conversion to Christianity.

A recent government report revealed shocking cases of physical, psychological and sexual violence, as well as the deaths of almost a thousand children.

“I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we have done,” he said in an impassioned speech before the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona, broadcast live by the White House.

He called the school system’s roughly 150 years as one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and “a sin on our soul.”

“I know that no apology will make up or make up for what was lost in the darkness of federal residential school policy,” he continued. “Today we finally move towards the light.”