President Biden will apologize for the 150-year-old Indian residential school policy

NORMAN, Okla. — President Joe Biden said he would formally apologize Friday for the country’s role in forcing indigenous children into residential care for more than 150 years, where many were physically, emotionally and sexually abused and more than 950 died.

“I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago: I’m making a formal apology to the Native American nations for the way we 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 she became the first Native American to lead the agency, and she will join Biden on his first diplomatic visit to the tribal nation as president when he delivers a speech at Friday at Gila. River Indian community outside of Phoenix.

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

The investigation she launched 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 into white society, while federal and state authorities sought to strip tribal nations of their land

The investigation documented 973 deaths – although it admitted the figure was likely higher – and 74 graves linked to more than 500 schools.

No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or the actions of the US government to exterminate Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Hawaiians.

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

“By apologizing, the president recognizes that we, as people who love our country, must remember and teach our full history, even when it hurts. And we must learn from that history so that it never happens again,” he said. The White House. the statement says.

The policy of forced assimilation, initiated 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 giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.

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

“This will be one of the best events of my entire life,” Haaland said of Biden’s apology on Friday.

It is unclear what action, if any, will follow the apology. The Department of the Interior continues to work with tribal nations to repatriate remains of children on federal lands. Some tribes are still at loggerheads with the US military, which has refused to comply with federal law governing the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

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

“Our children have been forced to live in a world that has erased their identity, their culture and turned their spoken language upside down,” Hoskin said in a statement. “There were 87 boarding schools in Oklahoma that attended thousands of our Cherokee children. And today, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation is affected in one way or another.”

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

“These things have value because they validate the experiences of survivors and acknowledge that they were seen,” Nobles said.

The US government has apologized for other historical injustices, including the Japanese families it imprisoned during World War II. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to pay compensation to tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law an apology to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of 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 create avenues for reparations for black Americans.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating Indigenous nations and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology in 2008. There was also a truth and reconciliation process, and later a plan to inject billions of dollars into communities devastated by government policies.

In 2022, Pope Francis issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s Indigenous residential school policy, saying the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, tore apart families and marginalized generations.

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

In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples 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 was grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading efforts to address the country’s role in the dark chapter for indigenous peoples. But he emphasized that the apology is only “an important step, after which actions must be continued.”