President Joe Biden presided over his final White House Tribal Nations Summit by reaching into the nation’s dark past and establishing a new national monument to honor the suffering of thousands of Native children and their families in federal boarding schools in the last century.
His proclamation starts a three-year clock to design a monument to be placed at the flagship Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879, with the stated mission to “kill the Indian” to “save the Man.” Schools like this removed children from their families and forced them to speak English, wear non-native clothing and eschew tribal customs.
Earlier this year, Biden described the treatment of thousands of Native children at government boarding schools as “a blot” on the nation’s history.
“The federal government mandated — mandated — removal of children from their families and tribes, launching what’s called the federal Indian boarding school era, over a 150-year span, 150 years from the early 1800s to 1970 — one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” he said earlier this year. “We should be ashamed.”
The most recent U.S. Census found that the population of those who consider themselves wholly or partly Native is upward of nearly 9 million. The U.S. Department of the Interior says it serves 1.9 million American Indian and Alaska Natives, many in sovereign lands.
That’s a shadow of the population that historians say thrived on the continent before European colonization. Native Americans were only granted universal U.S. citizenship in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Biden detailed his administration’s efforts to improve the livelihoods of descendants of the nation’s pre-colonial populations and to give communities more say, such as designating conservation areas.
