Biden set to apologize to Native Americans for Indian boarding schools

The president’s apology would come less than two weeks before the election and mark the first formal acknowledgement by a U.S. president of the government’s role in atrocities against Native children.

By Dana Hedgpeth, Sari Horwitz and Toluse Olorunnipa 

The Washington Post

President Joe Biden plans to formally apologize Friday for the U.S. government’s role in running hundreds of Indian boarding schools for a 150-year period that stripped Native American children of their language and culture in a systematic effort to force them to assimilate into White society.

“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,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “That’s why I’m heading west.”

These remarks would be the first time a U.S. president has apologized for the atrocities suffered by tens of thousands of Native children who were forced to attend the boarding schools over several generations. From 1819 to 1969, the U.S. government managed or paid churches and religious groups to run more than 400 federal Indian boarding schools across 37 states.

“It’s extraordinary that President Biden is doing this,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, in an interview with The Washington Post. “It will mean the world to so many people across Indian Country.”

Biden is set to make his historic announcement at the Gila Crossing Community School outside of Phoenix. The visit — his first to Indian Country as president — comes as Biden seeks to burnish his legacy before leaving office and boost his vice president’s campaign for the presidency less than two weeks before Election Day.

While Native American voters make up a small slice of the electorate, their votes could prove determinative in closely divided states such as Arizona. Biden’s move could have a reverberating impact with tribal members, whose votes are especially critical in North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan and other battleground states.

Biden won in Arizona in 2020 by less than 1 percentage point, carrying a state where Native Americans make up more than 5 percent of the population. The White House has billed Biden’s visit to the Gila River Indian Community as a promise kept, noting that his administration has given unprecedented amounts of funding to build roads and bridges, improve access to high-speed internet, and provide clean water for tribal communities.

For her part, Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to play up her record on issues important to Native Americans in recent campaign events, including a rally this month in Arizona. Former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies have also courted Native American voters during his presidential campaign, hoping to win over a group that typically leans Democratic.

Biden’s Friday event follows a report released by the Interior Department this summer that found that at least 973 Native American children, who were taken from their homes, died of disease and malnutrition at the schools. Many other children were physically abused, sexually assaulted and mistreated. The Interior Department urged the U.S. government this summer to formally apologize for the enduring trauma inflicted on Native Americans.

Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe of New Mexico whose grandparents and great-grandfather were taken from their homes and sent to boarding schools, launched the investigation three years ago, the first time the U.S. government had closely scrutinized the 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.

“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.”

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.

About two weeks after The Post’s report, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a formal apology for the church’s role in inflicting a “history of trauma” on Native Americans. The document said, “We all must do our part to increase awareness and break the culture of silence that surrounds all types of afflictions and past mistreatment and neglect.”

In 2022, Pope Francis traveled to Canada and apologized for the church’s role there in running boarding schools similar to those in the United States. But the pope has remained silent about the abuse at Catholic-run Indian boarding schools in the United States.

It is rare for a sitting American president to offer a formal apology for past national sins. In 1998, while speaking in Uganda, President Bill Clinton apologized for slavery in the United States and his country’s role in the trade of Africans.

On his trip to Phoenix, Biden is slated to be joined on Air Force One by Haaland and a group of tribal leaders from across the country, including Deborah Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and the chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

Native American advocates have also long been pushing for a formal presidential apology for the U.S. government’s role in creating and operating Indian boarding schools. In the spring, Parker met with Tom Perez, a senior adviser and assistant to Biden, at the White House and asked Biden to apologize for the widespread mistreatment and abuse that Native American children suffered at boarding schools.

But until now, the White House has been silent.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Parker said of the expected apology. “These schools were tools of assimilation and cultural genocide resulting in the loss of language and culture and the separation of children from their families.”

No one knows exactly how many Native American children attended the Indian boarding schools because many records were poorly kept, lost or destroyed. In the Interior report this summer, Newland’s team of researchers said it was able to identify 18,624 Native American children who were forced to attend the schools. But the report noted that the number of students was greater — and academic researchers who have studied this issue for years say the number is an undercount.

The Interior report also estimated that the federal government spent more than $23.3 billion, adjusted for inflation, over 98 years to implement the Indian boarding school system, similar institutions and associated assimilation policies.

Citing several studies, Haaland’s report highlighted the generational trauma of federal Indian boarding schools and other assimilation-related efforts, saying that these policies continue to fuel high suicide rates, drug abuse, alcoholism, and poor parenting in Native American communities.

The report’s recommendations included funding for the teaching of tribal languages that the government tried to erase and the possible return of some former boarding school sites to tribes. The report’s authors also recommended a national memorial to educate Americans about the boarding school era and honor the children who died while attending the schools.

When Haaland was a member of Congress in 2020, she introduced legislation to create the first commission in U.S. history to investigate and document America’s Indian boarding schools.

The legislation was reintroduced last year in the Senate and this year in the House — but has not reached the floor for a vote in either chamber. The commission would have subpoena power, which could be used to compel the Catholic Church and other religious institutions that ran the schools to disclose their internal documents about boarding schools, experts said.

Administration officials said Biden planned to use his Arizona stop to tout his administration’s accomplishments for tribal nations, highlighting $32 billion in funding from the American Rescue Plan, the conservation of vast swaths of land significant to tribes, and the appointment of Haaland and other high-ranking Native American officials.

Biden is also expected to praise the efforts of first lady Jill Biden, an educator who has visited tribal communities 10 times and pushed for Native language revitalization.

But the marquee moment Friday is the president’s expected apology, a long-awaited and welcomed message to many tribal leaders.

Stephen Roe Lewis, the governor of the Gila River Indian Community who comes from three generations of boarding school survivors, praised Biden’s plan to apologize.

“After four years, we’re finally getting an official apology from the president of the United States,” Lewis said. “Some of our elders who are boarding school survivors have been waiting all of their lives for this moment.”

“It’s going to be incredibly powerful and redemptive when the president issues this apology on Indian land,” Lewis said. “If only for a moment on Friday, this will rise to the top and the most powerful person in the world, our president, is shining a light on this dark history that’s been hidden.”

Tyler Pager contributed to this report.

First published October 24, 2024