Warning: this article contains content that may be distressing to First Nations readers.
Joe Biden will apologise for the US’s role in the institutional removal and abuse of Native American children, in a move that mirrors Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations.
The US president said he will formally apologise on Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children for over 150 years into boarding schools, where many were physically, emotionally and sexually abused, and more than 950 died.
“I’m doing something I should have 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,” Mr Biden said Thursday.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system shortly after she became the first Native American to lead the agency.
She will join the president on his first visit to a tribal nation to deliver the apology during a speech at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona on Friday.
“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” Ms Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, said.
“It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”
US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is the first Native American appointed to her post. (Jonathan Ernst)
Children removed from families
The investigation she launched found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as four — were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to dispossess tribal nations of their land.
The investigation documented 973 deaths — while acknowledging the figure is likely higher — and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologised for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or the US government’s actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian peoples.
The US government has offered apologies for other historic injustices, including to Japanese families it imprisoned during World War II.
In 1993, president Bill Clinton signed a law apologising to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.
The House and Senate passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologising for slavery and Jim Crow segregation, but did not create pathways to reparations for Black Americans.
‘Remember and teach our full history’
The Interior Department conducted listening sessions and gathered the testimony of survivors, before preparing a series of recommendations which included the acknowledgement and apology by the president.
Schools such as St. Paul’s Indian Mission School in Marty, South Dakota, boarded Native American children. (Reuters: Callaghan O’Hare)
“In making this apology, the president acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful,” the White House said in a statement.
“And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated.”
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilise” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of a wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.
It’s unclear what action, if any, will follow the apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands.
‘Profound moment’ for Native Americans
“President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country,” Cherokee Nation principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement.
“Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and up-ended their spoken language,” principal chief Hoskin Jr. said.
“Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended.
“Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact,” he continued.
Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action from the federal government, said Melissa Nobles, chancellor of MIT and author of The Politics of Official Apologies.
“These things have value because it validates the experiences of the survivors and acknowledges they’ve been seen,” Ms Nobles said.
Nations including Australia apologise
Australia’s own apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008 saw then prime minister Kevin Rudd formally say sorry to the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and the 1970s.
“For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry,” Mr Rudd said.
Kevin Rudd delivered the national apology to the Stolen Generations in Canberra on February 13 2008.
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 made a formal apology in 2008.
There was also a truth and reconciliation process, and later a plan to inject billions of dollars into communities devastated by the government’s policies.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s policy of Indigenous residential schools.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Francis said.
AP