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- By Levi Rickert and Neely Bardwell
BREAKING NEWS. President Joe Biden plans to issue a historic apology for federal Indian boarding schools that forcibly stripped Native children of their languages and culture over 150 years in a systematic campaign of assimilation.
Biden is planning to issue a formal apology to Native Americans during a visit Friday to the Gila River Indian Reservation near Phoenix, according to federal officials.
The presidential apology fulfills the first of eight recommendations made in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, Volume II, released by the Interior Department in June 2024. The 105-page report was penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) at the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), the first ever cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
“This is incredibly meaningful to have a sitting president admit the wrongdoings of the government, and I'm just honored to see this happen during my lifetime,” Haaland said in an interview with Native News Online. “I'm incredibly grateful to the president. He is courageous, he's kind, and he really is committed to Indian Country.”
The Indian boarding school era was a dark era in American history. Beginning in 1819, Native American children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools as part of a federal effort to assimilate them into white, Christian culture.
The practice lasted for over 150 years in 523 different schools. Thousands of children died from their homes. Many more suffered physical, emotional, or sexual abuse at the hands of the government and church, scarring them and the generations to follow.
The Interior’s investigation revealed that the U.S. government spent more than $23.3 billion in today’s dollars on the boarding school system and related assimilation policies between 1871 and 1969.
For Haaland, the issue resonates personally. “Both of my grandparents were victims of boarding Catholic Indian boarding schools. My great grandfather, years before I was born, was shipped off to boarding school, thousands of miles away from our small village of Mesita. My mother went to boarding schools, so there's no question that the Indian boarding schools affected my life, and I will say, quite frankly, it was traumatic,” she told Native News Online.
The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative was established in June 2021 in response to the discovery of 215 unmarked graves by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The Interior Department’s investigation unfolded in two phases. In 2023, its first report led to the Road to Healing tour, where Haaland and Newland traveled across Indian Country gathering testimony from boarding school survivors and their descendants. During the 12 stops on the healing tour, survivors shared grueling and sometimes graphic testing about physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
The second report, released in June 2024, made eight recommendations, with a presidential apology as a top priority. The report called for the U.S. government to “Acknowledge, Apologize, Repudiate, and Affirm” its role in forcing the assimilation of Native children through the boarding school systems.
The report writes: “The United States should accompany this acknowledgment with a formal apology to the individuals, families, and Indian Tribes that were harmed by U.S. policy. In addition, the United States could formally repudiate forced assimilation of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people as a national policy, and affirm that it is the policy of the United States to ensure that American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people have the right to maintain their unique cultural identities and languages.”
Other leaders have made similar gestures. In 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in perpetrating harm on the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children sent to residential schools in Canada.
In 2021, Nevada’s governor apologized for the state's role in forced assimilation of Native youth through the boarding schools.
More than two decades ago, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Gover (Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma) issued an apology for the emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual violence committed against children at the off-reservation schools.
With Biden’s apology marking a milestone in addressing this dark chapter of American history, Haaland said that more work remains to be done.
“There's three months left in this administration. That's still time to get some things done, and we intend to work very hard,” said Haaland. “We've had so much support for the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. We've had support from IHS (Indian Health Service). We've had a lot of support from other departments and offices across the government. We're grateful, and we'll keep going forward.”
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