During a visit to Gila River Indian Community today, President Joe Biden issued a “long overdue” formal apology for the abuse and trauma inflicted by the federal government’s Indian boarding school system. More than 900 Indigenous children died during what the president called “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.”
The federal government developed the Indian boarding school system as the centerpiece of a nearly two-century-long policy of forced assimilation. Tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly abducted from their families and sent to far-away boarding schools where they were given English names, forced to cut their hair, and forbidden from speaking their languages. Many children were beaten, starved, and abused in these schools.
“For Indigenous peoples, they served as places of trauma and terror for more than 100 years. Tens of thousands of Indigenous children, as young as four years old were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government and religious institutions,” President Biden said in Laveen, Arizona.
“Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher. Lost generations, culture and language. Lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” he continued.
“I formally apologize as president of United States of America for what we did.”
Under President Biden, the Interior Department conducted an unprecedented three-year investigation into the boarding school system. In July, it released a final report documenting the vast scale of the system and shared survivor accounts that illustrate how students’ traumatic experiences in Indian boarding schools—some of which operated into the 1960s—continue to harm them, their descendants, and their communities to this day.
“Indigenous peoples and Tribal Nations … have been striving to raise awareness of the grave injustices to our children into public consciousness for more than a century,” John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, said in a statement. He praised the Biden Administration’s efforts to document and report this history, which is not well known or understood today.
“As president,” Mr. Biden said, “I believe it is important that we do know there were generations of native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they never met, who spoke a language they had never heard.”
Native communities were silenced, “their children’s laughter and play were gone,” he continued. Indigenous children were “abused emotionally, physically and sexually abused, forced into hard labor, some put up for adoption without the consent of their birth parents, some left for dead and in unmarked graves.”
Children who did make it home, he said, were “wounded in body and spirit.”
The Interior Department’s report called for the U.S. government to formally apologize for its forced assimilation policies that harmed generations of Indigenous children, their families, and their communities.
“Quite frankly, there is no excuse that this apology took 150 years to make,” Mr. Biden said, after calling for a moment of silence to “remember those lost and the generations living with that trauma.”
“Federal Indian Boarding School policy, and the pain it has caused, will always be a significant mark of shame,” the president said. “A blot on American history.”
“It did take place,” Mr. Biden told a large crowd of tribal leaders, community members, and survivors. “Darkness can hide much. It erases nothing. Some injustices are heinous and horrific. They can’t be buried. We must know the good, the bad, the truth. We do not erase history. We make history. We learn from history, and we remember so we can heal as a nation.”
President Biden’s statement is the first public apology from a sitting U.S. president for deep and ongoing harms caused by federal boarding schools.
“This is going to really start the healing and the reconciliation and the redeeming of this sad part of history,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis told NPR. “A significant, very important part of this apology is admitting that this happened.”
Mr. Echohawk expressed hope that the visit and formal apology will lead to meaningful action—such as repatriating the remains of children who died at the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School—”so that Native communities may heal.”
“No apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Mr. Biden acknowledged. But, he added, “We’re finally moving forward into the light.”