Biden to apologize to Native Americans for Indian boarding school policy

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Cherokee children stand with hoes after planting victory garden at a boarding school, US, circa 1943. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

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President Joe Biden is set to formally apologize Friday for the country’s role in a Native American boarding school system that ripped at least 18,000 Indigenous children from their families and led to nearly 1,000 deaths.

It will be the first time a U.S. president has apologized for taking Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children and sending them to boarding schools that sought to assimilate them and dispossess their tribal nations of land.

"I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen," said Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and the first Native American to lead the Interior. "It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country."

Shortly after Haaland took office, she launched an investigation into the U.S. boarding school system for Native American children. The investigation found that from 1819 to 1969, at least 18,000 children, some as young as 4, were taken from their parents and forced to attend boarding schools. It also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.

The United National defines the forced removal of children as an element of genocide.

The final report from the Interior recommended, among other things, that the U.S. government acknowledge and apologize for the boarding school era. Haaland said she took that to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.

Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend a boarding school, will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech. "It will be one of the high points of my entire life," she said.

Biden is expected to make the historic announcement at the Gila Crossing Community School outside of Phoenix, according to The Washington Post.

It’s unclear what, if any, action will follow the apology. The Department of Interior is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands, and many tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has refused to follow the federal law regulating the return of Native American remains of those still buried at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

"Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language," Cherokee National Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement. "Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact.

"President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country," Hoskin said.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating Indigenous peoples and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 was followed by the establishment of a truth and reconciliation process and the injection of billions of dollars into First Nations to deal with the devastation left by the government’s policies.

No such commission exists in the U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill to establish a truth and reconciliation process, but the bill is stalled in the Senate.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s "catastrophic" policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

Hoskin said he is grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading the effort to reckon with the country’s role in a dark chapter for Indigenous peoples, but he emphasized that the apology is just "an important step, which must be followed by continued action."