President Biden to Apologize for 150 Years of Residential School Policy in India

NORMAN, Okla. – President Joe Biden said he will formally apologize Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children into residential schools for more than 150 years, where many suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse and more than 950 died.

“I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago: make a formal apology to the Indian people for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Biden said Thursday as he left the White House for Arizona.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the residential school system shortly after she became the first Native American to lead the agency, and she will join Biden on his first diplomatic visit to the tribal country as president when he delivers a speech Friday in Gila. River Indian community outside of Phoenix.

“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “This is very important to me. I am sure this will make a big difference for the entire country of India.”

The investigation she launched 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 into white society, while federal and state authorities sought to deprive tribal peoples their lands.

The investigation recorded 973 deaths (although it acknowledged the figure was likely higher) and 74 burials associated with more than 500 schools.

No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of these children—an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations—or for the U.S. government’s actions in exterminating Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

The Home Office held hearings and collected testimonies from survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgment and apology for the residential school era. Haaland said she conveyed this to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.

“By apologizing, the President recognizes that we, as people who love our country, must remember and teach all of our history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from this history so that it never happens again,” the White House said in a statement.

The policy of forced assimilation, begun by Congress in 1819 as an attempt to “civilize” Native Americans, ended in 1978 with the passage of sweeping legislation, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily intended to give tribes a voice in who adopts them. children.

Biden and Haaland’s visit to the Gila River Indian community comes as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising targeting Native American voters in battleground states including Arizona and North Carolina.

“This will be one of the proudest moments of my life,” Haaland said of Biden’s apology on Friday.

It is unclear what action, if any, will follow the apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the children’s remains to federal lands. Some tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army, which has refused to follow federal law governing 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 people across this country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to the AP.

“Our children were created to live in a world that erased their identity, their culture and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in a statement. “There were 87 boarding schools in Oklahoma that educated thousands of our Cherokee children. To this day, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation feels that influence in some way.”

Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations that are still pushing for continued action from the federal government, said Melissa Nobles, chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “The Politics of Official Apologies.”

“These things have value because they validate the experiences of survivors and acknowledge that they were seen,” Nobles said.

The US government has apologized for other historical injustices, including against Japanese families imprisoned during World War II. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to compensate tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed legislation apologizing to Native Hawaiians for overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.

In 2008 and 2009, the House and Senate passed resolutions apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But these gestures did not pave the way for reparations for black Americans.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating Indigenous peoples and forcing their children into residential schools for assimilation, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology in 2008. billions of dollars into communities devastated by government policies.

In 2022, Pope Francis issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s collaboration with Canada’s residential school policies for Indigenous peoples, saying the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Christian society destroyed their culture, tore apart families and marginalized generations.

“I humbly apologize for the evil committed by many Christians against indigenous peoples,” Francis said.

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 to address the country’s role in a dark chapter for Indigenous people. But he stressed that the apology is just “an important step that must be followed by further action.”