On, Friday he became the first sitting U.S. president to apologize for the systemic abuse generations of Indigenous children endured in boarding schools at the hands of the federal government.
The United States removed Indigenous children as young as 4 from their homes and sent them away to the schools, where they were stripped of their cultures, histories and religions and beaten for speaking their languages.
“We should be ashamed,” Biden said to Indigenous people, including tribal leaders, survivors and their families, gathered at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix. Biden called the system “one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” while acknowledging the decades of abuse inflicted on children and widespread devastation left behind.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who introduced a bill last year to establish a truth and healing commission to address the harms caused by the boarding school system, called the apology “a historic step toward long-overdue accountability for the harms done to Native children and their communities.”
The schools were intended both to assimilate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children and to dispossess tribal nations of their land, according to an Interior Department investigation launched by Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to lead the agency. A member of the Pueblo of Laguna, Haaland commissioned the investigation in 2021.
The investigation documented the cases of more than 18,000 Indigenous children, of whom 973 were killed. The report and independent researchers say the overall number was much higher.
As part of the investigation, former students recounted harmful and often degrading treatment they endured at the hands of teachers and administrators while separated from their families. Descendants spoke about traumas that have passed down through generations and are seen in broken relationships, substance abuse and other social problems that plague reservations today.
Bill Hall, 71, of Seattle, was 9 when he was taken from his Tlingit community in Alaska and forced to attend a boarding school, where he endured years of physical and sexual abuse that led to many more years of shame. He and others long have been advocating for resources to redress the harm.
Congress laid the framework for the nationwide boarding school system for Native Americans in 1819 under the fifth president, James Monroe. The last of the schools opened in 1969, the same year that a Senate report declared the boarding school system a national tragedy. It found that the schools were grossly underfinanced, academically deficient and had a “major emphasis” on discipline and punishment.
The forced assimilation policy was finally and officially rejected with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, but the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials say. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the effort to “civilize” Indigenous students.
Here is a transcript of Biden’s apology, from the White House.
And here is more on the boarding schools, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.