Pershlie Ami, a resident of the Hopi tribe, shares her experiences attending Phoenix Indian School when she was a child during the Road to Healing tour hosted by the U.S. Department of the Interior at Gila Crossing Community School on 20 January 2023. Photo by Shondain silversmith/Arizona mirror.
For the first time in history, a sitting U.S. president will apologize to Native communities for the role the federal government played in the atrocities Native children faced in the federal Native American Boarding School system.
The apology, which President Joe Biden will deliver Friday when he speaks at the Gila River Crossing School at the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix, comes three years after Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched the first-ever investigation into Native American Boarding Schools.
The final boarding school report included eight recommendations from the Department of Indian Affairs to the federal government that would support a path to healing for tribal communities.
At the top of that list was a call for the United States to acknowledge and apologize for its role in the federal Indian boarding school policy, which has harmed — and continues to harm — indigenous peoples across the country.
“The president takes that to heart, and he plans to apologize to Indian Country for the boarding school era,” Haaland said in an Oct. 23 interview with the Arizona MirroR.
Haaland said she has found herself in a bind since receiving the news that Biden planned to apologize because of the work so many people have done to shed light on Native American boarding schools and the lasting impact it has had on indigenous communities .
“It’s incredibly meaningful,” Haaland said, because as part of the boarding school initiative, their department hosted the Road to Healing tour, visiting various indigenous communities to hear stories about boarding schools.
“They were all heartbreaking,” Haaland said of the stories shared by the victims and their families. “We have witnessed so many testimonies from survivors and descendants, and I have a deep understanding of what so many people have experienced and what our community has suffered.”
The Department of the Interior investigated the federal Indian boarding school system in the United States and identified more than 400 schools and more than 70 cemeteries.
Arizona was home to 47 of those schools, which housed native children who were taken from their families and attempted to assimilate them through education – and often through physical punishment.
The legacy of the federal Indian boarding school system is not new to indigenous people. For centuries, indigenous peoples across the country have experienced the loss of their culture, traditions, language and land.
“This is an incredibly suppressed history that so many people didn’t know about and is now seeing the light of day,” Haaland said. “I have to believe that people will heal from what we were able to do, and especially hearing President Biden, who has been the best president for Indian Country in my lifetime, say he’s sorry, it’s indescribable.”
Biden plans to visit Indian Country for the first time on October 25, where he will join Haaland to apologize at Gila River Crossing School.
“Some of our seniors who have survived boarding school have been waiting their entire lives for this moment,” Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror.
“It will be incredibly powerful and redemptive if the President makes this apology to Indian soil,” he added. “If only for a moment, on Friday this will rise to the top and the most powerful person in the world, our president, will shine a light on this dark history that has been hidden.”
Haaland said Biden, the first sitting president willing to apologize, is helping Indian Country feel seen because of the “terrible history” of Native American Boarding Schools and assimilation policies aimed at pushing Native people out of their communities ‘so long’ has been ignored.
“It was an outright attack and genocide that our communities have experienced for centuries, and we are still here,” Haaland said. “Nothing the federal government or anyone else has done over the centuries has succeeded in eradicating us.”
“We have persevered,” she added. “I am so proud that the sitting president recognizes that. It’s amazing and I’m very grateful.”
When April Ignacio, co-founder of Indivisible Tohono, heard that the president is ready to apologize, he said it is a historic event because they are finally recognizing the government’s role in a national policy of forced assimilation against the first peoples of this country .
“Never in my life did I think we would be here,” Ignacio said. “This apology is long overdue, and the impact the boarding school era had on our loss of culture and language must be coupled with immediate action through reparations.”
In 2023, Ignacio said, Indivisible Tohono organized a caravan of 18 Tohono O’odham elders who were boarding school survivors and participants to testify during the Road to Healing Tour organized by the Department of the Interior.
Ignacio said she has five generations of boarding school survivors and attendees in her family. She shared her story during the Road to Healing tour.
“As co-founder of Indivisible Tohono, I thank President Biden for his willingness to address the historic and ongoing impact of the Indian boarding school policy,” Ignacio said. “This apology is consistent with President Biden’s pledge to honor sovereignty, and this historic recognition will be part of his legacy.”
Praise for Biden’s upcoming apology is being shared by tribes across the country, including the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.
“President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native peoples in this country,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a written statement. “I applaud the President for long overdue recognition of the pain and suffering inflicted on tribes and boarding school survivors.”
Hoskin said Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools, which were attended by thousands of Cherkee children. Today, he said, almost every Cherokee Nation citizen is feeling the impact.
“Our children are made to live in a world that erases their identity and culture and turns their spoken language upside down,” he said. “They often suffered from harm, abuse, neglect and were forced to live in the shadows.”
The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest tribes in the United States with more than 450,000 tribal citizens. About 141,000 of them live within the tribe’s reservations in northeastern Oklahoma.
“The significance of this public apology by the President on behalf of this nation is amplified and is an important step that must be followed by continued action,” Hoskin said.
He said the Home Office’s recommendations in the boarding school report, especially those focused on the preservation of indigenous languages and the repatriation of ancestors and cultural objects, could be a path to real healing.
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