President Joe Biden flew to Arizona yesterday, where he plans to issue a formal apology to Native Americans today for the US government’s policy of forced “assimilation” through a system of Indian schools (that’s the historical name, so we’ll use it as needed). This is the first time any president has apologized for what amounted to an attempt at cultural genocide; in comparison, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for that country’s Indian Residential Schools back in 2008 as part of a years-long truth and reconciliation process. Canada beat us to universal healthcare too, just saying.
As he headed to Marine One on the White House lawn yesterday, Biden jogged over to reporters to tell them, “I’m heading to do something that should have been done a long time ago — to make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years. That’s why I’m heading west.”
The Indian schools policy lasted 150 years, from 1819 to 1969, forcibly removing generations of Native children from their families and sending them to boarding schools where the explicit goal was to strip them of their tribal languages and customs. The US government had more than 400 of the schools in 37 states, and either ran schools itself or contracted them out to churches and religious orders.
At those schools, The Washington Post explains (gift link),
By 1900, 1 in 5 Native American school-age children were sent to a boarding school, sometimes thousands of miles from their families. Children were stripped of their names and instead often assigned numbers. Their long hair was cut and they were beaten for speaking their languages, leaving deep emotional scars on Native American families and communities.
At least 80 of the schools were operated by the Catholic church or its affiliates. The Post, in a year-long investigation published in May, found at least 122 priests, sisters and brothers assigned to 22 boarding schools since the 1890s were later accused of sexually abusing Native American children under their care. Most of the documented abuse, which involved more than 1,000 children, occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
Personal aside: When I was in college in the early 1980s, my next door neighbor in Flagstaff was a middle-aged woman who worked for the Navajo Nation government; she was the first person who really gave me a sense of how bad the schools had been — it might also have been mentioned in high school by my wonderfully lefty US History teacher, but hearing it from a survivor made it very real.
And yes, that’s the word. Those who were sent to the boarding schools are commonly called survivors instead of former students.
Biden is scheduled to speak at 12:30 Eastern at the Gila Crossing Community School near Phoenix. The Post reports, a bit surprisingly, that this will be the first time that Biden has actually visited tribal land during his presidency. (Update/clarification: Let’s say “tribal-governed land,” given that most of the continent was at some point tribal land). Despite that, Biden has also made Native America a focus of his time in office, designating new national monuments that protect sacred sites and tribal areas, including the restoration of parts of monuments Trump had made smaller; holding a Tribal Nations Summit at the White House; and appointing former US Rep. Deb Haaland, of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, as Interior Secretary, making her the nation’s first Native American Cabinet member. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of the Interior Department, so that representation was, like the apology, well overdue.
President Biden is scheduled to speak at 12:30 Eastern; here’s the PBS video stream.
Haaland told the Post in an interview, “It’s extraordinary that President Biden is doing this. […] It will mean the world to so many people across Indian Country.”
“I think the folks who suffered through that era personally — the survivors, the descendants — will feel seen by the president,” Haaland told The Post. “That’s something that a lot of people have not experienced in this country and throughout our history.”
And sure, it’s not entirely coincidental that Biden’s apology comes less than two weeks before the presidential election, because Native Americans are a key part of the Democratic coalition, and in states like Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Michigan, may be a crucial part of winning close contests in both the presidential and state and local elections.
But the timing isn’t solely electoral, either, since Biden wanted to follow up quickly on the recommendations of a federal report on the boarding schools that was released in July by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as part of an ongoing initiative — yet another overdue first — begun by Haaland in June 2021, almost immediately after Biden took office.
That report identified at lease 973 Native American children who died of disease or malnutrition. The report also found that many children were physically abused, sexually assaulted, and casually neglected and mistreated, and the researchers were able to identify 18,624 Native children forced to go to the schools.
The report and academic researchers agree that all those numbers are almost certainly higher due to lax record-keeping by school administrators and bureaucrats in Washington, as well as records being lost over time. White people have long had a tendency to be lazy and shiftless in documenting the experiences of nonwhite Americans, although we hear many of them are making progress in recent decades. The report called on the government to formally apologize for the enduring, generational trauma the schools inflicted on Native Americans.
As the Post explains, Haaland’s own grandparents and great-grandfather were taken from their families and shipped off to boarding schools,
Along with Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, Haaland spent more than a year traveling from Oklahoma to Alaska on a tour billed as “The Road to Healing.” At 12 stops, for up to eight hours a day, they listened to stories of emotional, physical and sexual abuse told by survivors and their descendants.
The apology is very welcome for many tribal leaders, who also add that it’s kind of a first step, ahem. In a statement, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. called the apology “a profound moment for Native people across this country” but also said it’s an “important step, which must be followed by continued action” like other recommendations in the Interior Department report, such as preservation of Native languages and the “repatriation of ancestors and cultural items” from museums, and that phrasing helps communicate the ache — not “remains,” but ancestors. The rest of us in this country can, with leadership from and in cooperation with Indigenous peoples, do the work to bring some degree of healing that starts with Biden’s apology.
[WaPo (gift link) / White House / Photo: National Archives]
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