US President Joe Biden said he would formally apologize on Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children into residential schools, where many were physically, emotionally and sexually abused and nearly 1,000 children died.
“I am doing something I should have done a long time ago: making a formal apology to Indian Nations for the way we have treated their children for many years,” Biden said as he left the White House on Thursday for Arizona.
“Never in a million years would I have imagined something like this would happen,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of Pueblo Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “It’s a big problem for me. I’m sure it will be a big problem for everyone in Indian Country.”
Haaland launched an investigation into the residential school system shortly after she became the first Native American to lead the Interior Department. It found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as 4 years old — 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 lands.
The investigation also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 graves linked to more than 500 schools.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks at the opening of a hearing for survivors of government-sponsored Native American boarding schools at Montana State University, Sunday, Nov. 5, 2023, in Bozeman, Mont. The Interior Department says more than 400 government-supported abusive schools operate across the United States (AP Photo/Matthew Brown).
No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — during the more than 150 years that the United States government worked to eliminate Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.
The Ministry of Interior conducted hearings and collected survivors’ testimonies. One of the final report’s recommendations was to acknowledge and apologize for the residential school era. Haaland said she conveyed this to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.
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The White House said Biden believes that “to usher in the next era of federal-tribal relations, we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past.”
“In offering this apology, the President acknowledges that as a people who love our country we must remember and know our entire history, even when it hurts. We must learn from this history so that it is never repeated.”
The policy of forced assimilation initiated by Congress in 1819 as an attempt to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of a wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which focused primarily on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children. .
Haaland will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech in the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix. This comes as the 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 most important points in my entire life,” Haaland said.
It is unclear what, if any, procedures will follow the apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to return the remains of children found on federal lands. Some tribes remain at odds with the US military, which has refused to follow federal law regulating 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 a profound moment for Indigenous people across this country,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., Grand Chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“Our children have been forced to live in a world that has erased their identities, their culture, and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools that attended thousands of our Cherokee children. Even today, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation feels the impact in one way or another.
Friday’s apology could lead to more progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action by the federal government, because it is an acknowledgment of past wrongs that have been left uncorrected, said Melissa Nobles, an MIT consultant and author of “Politics.” “Known and buried” command. Of official apologies.
“These things have value because they validate survivors’ experiences and acknowledge that they were seen and heard, and there is a lot of historical evidence that this happened,” Nobles said.
Canada has a similar history of subjugating Indigenous people and forcing their children to attend residential schools to assimilate them.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “disastrous” Indigenous residential schools policy, saying the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into the Christian community had destroyed their cultures, separated their families and marginalized their generations.
“I’m deeply sorry,” Francis told school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered in Alberta. He called the school’s policy a “catastrophic mistake” that was inconsistent with the Bible. “I humbly ask for forgiveness for the evil committed by many Christians against indigenous peoples,” Francis said.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of 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 was grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading efforts to reckon with the country’s role in a dark chapter for indigenous peoples, but stressed that the apology is just “an important step that must be followed by continued work.”
“It’s a beautiful beginning to see these children whose stories have never been told,” said Deborah Parker, executive director of the National Coalition to Heal Native American Residential Schools, which has worked for the Interior Department. Parker, a Tulalip Tribe citizen, hopes this recognition will lead to more steps being taken to address the needs of affected indigenous communities.
— Associated Press writers Peter Smith in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Josh Boak at the White House contributed to this report.
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