NORMAN, Okla.– President Joe Biden is expected to formally apologize for the country’s role in it on Friday the Indian boarding school systemthat destroyed the lives of generations of indigenous children and their ancestors.
“I never in a million years would have imagined something like this would happen,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna. “It’s a big problem for me. I am sure it will be a big problem for the whole of Indian country.”
Shortly after becoming the first Native American to lead Interior, Haaland launched a research in the boarding school system, which revealed that at least 18,000 children, some as young as four years old, were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them, in an effort to dispossess their tribal lands. It also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 graves associated with the more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forcible removal of Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children—an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations—or any other aspect of the U.S. decimation of indigenous peoples government.
During the second phase of its investigation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out listening sessions and collected the testimony of survivors. One of the recommendations from the final report was an acknowledgment of and apology for the boarding school era. Haaland said she brought that up to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.
Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend boarding school, said she was honored to play a role along with her staff in helping make the apology a reality. Haaland will join Biden on Friday on his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president as he delivers his speech. “It will be one of the highlights of my entire life,” she said.
It is unclear what action will follow the apology. The Department of the Interior is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children to federal lands, and many tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has refused to follow federal law requiring the regulates 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 Native peoples in this country,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“Our children were created to live in a world that erases their identity and culture and turns their spoken language upside down,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools that thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, almost every Cherokee Nation citizen feels the impact in some way.
Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action from the federal government because it is an acknowledgment of past wrongs that have not been righted, something that is “known and buried,” he says Melissa Nobles, chancellor of MIT and author of “The Politics.” of official apology.”
“These things have value because it validates the experiences of the survivors and acknowledges that they were seen and we heard you, and there is also a lot of historical evidence to suggest that this happened,” Nobles said.
In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating indigenous peoples and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, a 2017 apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was followed by the creation of a truth and reconciliation process and the infusion of billions of dollars in First Nations to confront the devastation caused by government policies.
Such a committee does not exist in the US. Last year, a bill to establish a truth and reconciliation process was introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, but it is still in the Senate.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s collaboration with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of residential schools for indigenous peoples. He said the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples into Christian society has destroyed their cultures, separated families and marginalized generations.
“I am deeply sorry,” Francis told school survivors and Indigenous community members who gathered in Alberta. He called the school policy a “disastrous mistake” that was incompatible with the Gospel. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil that so many Christians have committed 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 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 is grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading the effort consider with the country’s role in a dark chapter for indigenous peoples, but he emphasized that the apology is only “an important step that must be followed by continued action.”