President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned, historic apology Friday for one of the United States “most horrific chapters”: ripping Native American children from their families and putting them in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their culture.
From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity.
A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with the estimated deaths of nearly 1,000 children — with the true figure thought to be considerably higher.
“I formally apologize, as president of the United States, for what we did,” he said in a speech that alternated between fiery and deeply emotional, addressing the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona.
He added the roughly 150 years the school system existed were one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and a “sin on our soul.”
“I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” he continued. “Today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
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.
More details about boarding school atrocities:
More than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada and at least 60,000 children in the United States were forcibly taken from their families and moved to boarding schools, often hundreds of miles from the children’s families and communities. The purpose of the schools was to force the children’s assimilation into a white European and Christian way of life. Many children never returned home, and their fates were unknown.
The boarding schools, run in both countries from the late 1800s until the 1970s in the US and even later in Canada, were often places of great cruelty, including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. The schools were funded by the national governments, and many were operated by the Catholic Church2 in both Canada and the US. In the US, more than 350 schools were spread out across 29 states. In an 1892 speech, U.S. Army officer Richard Pratt, who founded one of the first schools, described the policy as “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
Several months ago, mass graves were discovered on the grounds of four former residential schools in Canada. The graves contained the remains of more than a thousand children.
