Biden issues rare presidential apology over Indian boarding schools

President Joe Biden apologized for the federal government’s role in running a system of Indian boarding schools that separated Native American children from their families and wreaked havoc on tribal communities.

“It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said Friday at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, calling his formal apology “long overdue” and making a call to “rewrite the history book correctly” while paying tribute to an under-served community.

“We do not erase history. We make history. We learn from history,” he said. “For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention,” and the transgressions continued even after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which got him engaged in politics, Biden said.

Biden’s address presented a landmark moment – a public apology from a sitting U.S. president to acknowledge the harm caused to generations of indigenous families by the federal government’s policy of trying to culturally assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children. His visit to Indian Country marked the first in a decade for a sitting president, he said.

The government’s Indian boarding school system was run between 1819 and the 1970s and involved policies that forcibly removed children from their families. Children attending the schools were often subjected to physical and emotional abuse – and in some cases died, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Biden detailed findings of what he characterized as a decades-long investigative effort, highlighting the abuse of children, with some put up for adoption without consent and others left for dead. The targeting of children was meant to cut off their ties to their heritage, he said, lamenting that their hair, a sacred symbol, was chopped off and their names were replaced by numbers or English substitutes.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary in US history, joined Biden for the event. She cast the schools as sources of “trauma and terror” for more than a century, citing members of her own family who were forcibly boarded away from home and pledging federal resources to preserve native languages.

“Today is a day for remembering, but it’s also a day to celebrate our perseverance. In spite of everything that has happened, we are still here,” Haaland said. “Indigenous peoples have always been here, and today we commit to our shared future.”

Haaland in 2021 announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, an effort to recognize the legacy of Indian boarding school policies and address their impact. An Interior report released earlier this year confirmed the deaths of at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children while attending the boarding schools.

Biden also used the event to tout his administration’s investments in Indian Country. According to the White House, tribal nations received $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan, $13 billion in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build high-speed Internet, roads, bridges, public transit, and clean water sanitation infrastructure.

Biden delivered his Arizona remarks with Election Day a little over a week away and polls showing a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. Arizona is a battleground state — one of seven that is likely to determine the outcome of the election — and one where Native American voters offer to be a crucial bloc.

A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday found Harris and Trump statistically tied in each of the seven swing states among likely voters. In Arizona, Harris leads Trump by 49.1% to 48.8%.