President Joe Biden delivered a passionate, historic apology Friday for one of the United States “most horrific chapters”: ripping Native American children from their families and putting them in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their culture.
From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity.
A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with the estimated deaths of nearly 1,000 children — with the true figure thought to be considerably higher.
“As president of the United States, I formally apologize for what we did,” Biden said in a speech that alternated between fiery and deeply emotional, addressing the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona.
He added the roughly 150 years the school system existed were one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and a “sin on our soul.”
“I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” he continued. “Today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
Biden was joined by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, who struck a defiant tone as she recalled her maternal grandparents “were stolen from their communities and forced to live in a Catholic school.”
Federal authorities “failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our lifeways,” she continued. “Despite everything that has happened, we are still here!”
The Biden administration has invested significantly in Native American communities, with executive actions expanding Tribal autonomy, directing agencies to prioritize gender-based violence, designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites, and more.
The apology follows formal declarations in Canada, where thousands of children died at similar boarding schools and other countries around the world where historical abuses of Indigenous populations are increasingly being recognised.
In all, there were more than 400 schools, often church-run, across 37 states or then-territories.
