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President Joe Biden said Thursday he will formally apologize for the U.S. government’s role in separating Native American children from their families and subjecting them to mistreatment in boarding schools. This gesture seeks to recognize the enduring harm these policies caused within Indigenous communities across the nation.
For well over a century, these boarding schools pursued the forced assimilation of Native American youth, often using abusive methods to break cultural ties.
A recent report from the government has cataloged the extensive trauma inflicted, detailing hundreds of cases of abuse and the deaths of more than 950 children within these institutions.
“I’m heading to do something that should have been done a long time ago,” the president said as he left the White House. “To make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”
Biden is scheduled to issue the formal apology on Friday during a visit to the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, a state with a substantial Native American population and a major player in national elections. The visit highlights the administration’s focus on honoring Indigenous history and addressing historical injustices in places central to Native life.
These government-run boarding schools opened in the early 1800s and continued until the 1970s, part of a broader federal campaign to assimilate Native American children at the cost of their cultural heritage.
At least 973 children died in these government-run boarding schools, the report noted, many of which were situated hundreds of miles from the children’s homelands, isolating them further from family and support.
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Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history, was a major force behind the investigation that produced the report.
“For more than a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children as young as four years old, were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools,” Haaland told reporters. “This includes my own family.”
“For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books,” she continued. “But now our administration’s work will ensure that no one will ever forget.”
The apology follows formal declarations in Canada, where thousands of children died at similar boarding schools, and other countries around the world where historic abuses of Indigenous populations are increasingly being recognized.
In a statement, the White House said the apology was being issued in order to “remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful.”
“That the president is taking that step tomorrow is so historic, I’m not sure I could adequately put its impact into words,” Haaland said.
