US President Biden issues official apology for Native American boarding school abuses News
The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
US President Biden issues official apology for Native American boarding school abuses

US President Joe Biden on Friday issued an official apology on behalf of the United States at the Gila River Indian Reservation for the historic abuses of the federally-run boarding schools forcefully imposed on Native Americans.

Biden remarked on Native Americans’ achievements before the US expanded its rule westward, highlighting their democratic governance, advanced agriculture, and scientific and artistic accomplishments. He also described Native Americans as the most patriotic Americans, stating that they volunteer to serve in the US military five times more than the national average.

The US Department of the Interior explained the role of the schools:

Between 1819 through the 1970s, the United States implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the nation. The purpose of federal Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children by forcibly removing them from their families, communities, languages, religions and cultural beliefs. While children attended federal boarding schools, many endured physical and emotional abuse and, in some cases, died.

Some of these abuses included renaming indigenous children with English names or even numbers, cutting off their hair that they considered to be sacred, forcing them to perform military drills and hard labor, beatings, sexual exploitation, and being put up for adoption.

Biden’s visit to the Gila River reservation is part of the larger project to heal the damaged relations between the Native American nations and the US government. His apology comes after the US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s completion of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The initiative’s purpose was to investigate the past of the federal Indian boarding school system and to visit survivors of the system. The initiative allowed survivors to have their experiences heard by the US government for the first time, helping them recover from the trauma, and spreading awareness of the school system’s abuses.
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