President Biden apologizes for 150 years of residential school policy in India

NORMAN, Okla. – President Joe Biden said he would formally apologize Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children into residential schools for more than 150 years, where many were physically, emotionally and sexually abused and more than 950 died.

“I am doing something I should have done a long time ago: I am formally apologizing to the Indian nations for the way we have treated their children for so many years,” Biden said Thursday as he addressed the White House Left home for Arizona.

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

“I never in a million years thought something like this would happen,” Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “It’s a big deal for me. I’m sure it will be a big deal for all of Indian Country.”

The investigation she launched found that at least 18,000 children – some as young as four years old – were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools designed to integrate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to protect tribal peoples to expropriate their land.

The investigation documented 973 deaths – although the number is likely higher – and 74 burial sites associated with the more than 500 schools.

No president has ever officially apologized for the forced displacement of these children – an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations – or for the US government’s actions to decimate the Native Americans, Alaska and Hawaii.

The Home Office conducted hearings and collected survivors’ statements. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgment and apology for the time spent at boarding school. Haaland said she brought this to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.

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

The forced assimilation policy that Congress instituted in 1819 as an attempt to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of a sweeping law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which focused primarily on giving tribes a say in the adoption of their Indians to give children.

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

“It will be one of the highlights of my entire 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 children’s remains on federal lands. Some tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army, which has refused to follow federal laws regulating 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 Indigenous people in this country,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., chief chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a statement to the AP.

“Our children had to live in a world that erased their identity and culture and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 residential schools that thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Even today, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation feels the effects in some way.”

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

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

The U.S. government has apologized for other historical injustices, including for Japanese families it 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 a law apologizing to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.

The House and Senate passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But the gestures did not provide a path to reparations for black Americans.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating First Nations and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized in 2008. There was also a truth and reconciliation process and later a plan to bring billions of dollars into communities devastated by the government’s policies.

Pope Francis made a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s collaboration with Canada’s Indigenous residential schools policy, saying the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into Christian society had destroyed their cultures, separated families and excluded generations.

“I humbly ask for forgiveness for the evil that so many Christians have done to 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 relocation 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 reckon with the country’s role in a dark chapter for indigenous peoples. However, he stressed that the apology was merely “an important step that must be followed by further action.”