Biden apologizes for past U.S. policy on boarding schools for Indigenous children
'It's long, long, long overdue,' president says
U.S. President Joe Biden formally apologized on Friday to Indigenous people in the United States for the government's role in the abuse and neglect of children sent to federal boarding schools in order to assimilate them into white society.
At least 973 Native American children died in the abusive boarding school system over a 150-year period that ended in 1969, according to an Interior Department investigation that called for a U.S. government apology.
The same investigation said that death toll was likely a conservative estimate.
"The federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened — until today. I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did," Biden said at the Gila Crossing Community School in the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Laveen, Ariz., outside Phoenix.
"It's long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there's no excuse this apology took 50 years to make," he added. "The federal Indian boarding school policy and the pain that it has caused will always be a mark of shame, a blot, on American history."
At least 18,000 children, some as young as four years of age, were taken from their parents and forced to attend the schools. Biden said the boarding school era was a "horrific chapter" of which Americans should be "ashamed."
"I say this with all sincerity: This, to me, is one of the most consequential things I've ever had an opportunity to do in my whole career as president of the United States," Biden said at the podium before delivering his apology. "It's an honour, a genuine honour, to be in this special place on this special day."
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, launched the investigation into the boarding school system, and joined Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president as he delivered the speech.
"It will be one of the high points of my entire life," Haaland said on Thursday.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of the Indigenous children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or for the U.S. government's actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Peoples.
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to "civilize" Indigenous people in the U.S. ended in 1978 after the passage of a wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.
In Canada in 2008, then-prime minister Stephen Harper issued an apology to former students of the residential school system across the country. Harper made the apology in the House of Commons, with Indigenous leaders and survivors as witnesses.
The speech has since been translated into seven Indigenous languages.
The U.S. government has offered apologies for other historic injustices, including to Japanese families it imprisoned during the Second World War. When he was 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, then-president Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Indigenous people in Hawaii for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But the gestures did not create pathways to reparations for Black Americans.
It's unclear what action, if any, will follow Friday's apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands.
With files from CBC News