BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) – The White House says President Joe Biden will apologize Friday on behalf of the U.S. government for its 150-year campaign to destroy Native American culture, language and identity by forcing children into abusive Indian boarding schools.
More than 900 children died in the government-funded schools, the last of which closed or moved to other institutions decades ago. Their dark legacy continues to be felt in indigenous communities where survivors struggle with generational trauma from the torture, sexual abuse and hatred they endured.
Biden is expected to formally acknowledge and apologize for the federal government’s role during an appearance at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.
A closer look at the federal boarding school system:
150 years of forced assimilation
Congress laid the framework for a nationwide boarding school system for Native Americans in 1819 under the fifth U.S. president, James Monroe, with legislation known as the Indian Civilization Act. It was ostensibly aimed at arresting the “final extinction of the Indian tribes” and “introducing among them the customs and arts of civilization.”
Central to that effort was the dissolution of indigenous families and severing the generational ties that had kept their cultures alive despite being forced onto reservations.
Over the next 150 years, government and religious institutions, supported by taxpayer dollars, operated at least 417 schools in 37 states. School staff attempted to deprive indigenous children of their traditions and heritage. Teachers and administrators cut their hair, forbade them to speak their own language and forced them to do manual labor.
According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, most Native school-aged children in the 1920s – some 60,000 at one point – attended boarding schools run by the federal government or by religious organizations.
The heaviest concentrations of the schools were in states with some of the largest native populations: Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota and the Dakotas. But the schools were located in every region of the US, and students – some as young as four years old – were often sent to schools far from home.
The last of the schools opened in 1969, the same year a Senate report declared the boarding system a national tragedy. They were found to be severely underfunded, academically deficient and had a “great emphasis” on discipline and punishment.
The forced assimilation policy was finally and officially rejected with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. However, despite this policy change, the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.
Survivors talk about abuse
A nationwide reexamination of the system was launched in 2021 by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo and the nation’s first Native American cabinet secretary.
She and other Interior officials held listening sessions on and off reservations across the U.S. for two years to get school survivors and their family members to tell their stories.
Former students recounted the harmful and often humiliating treatment they suffered at the hands of teachers and administrators while separated from their families. Their descendants spoke of trauma passed down through the generations, manifested in broken relationships, substance abuse and other social problems that plague reservations today.
Haaland’s grandparents were among them – taken from their community when they were eight years old and forced to live in a Catholic boarding school until the age of 13.
“Make no mistake: This was a concerted effort to eradicate the quote ‘Indian problem’ — to assimilate or annihilate indigenous peoples altogether,” Haaland said in July when the findings of the agency’s investigation were released. The agency’s main recommendation was that the government issue a formal apology.
Unmarked graves and repatriations
At least 973 Native American children died in the boarding school system. They included an estimated 187 American Indian and Alaska Native children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is now the site of the US Army War College. Officials are continuing the repatriations — last month the remains of three children who died at the school were exhumed and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.
The Ministry of the Interior’s investigation found marked and unmarked graves at 65 boarding schools. The causes of death included illness and abuse. More children may have died off campuses after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded with a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Native students.
More than 200 of the government-supported schools had a religious affiliation. The boarding school coalition has identified more than 100 additional schools not on the government list that are run by churches, without any evidence of federal support.
U.S. Catholic bishops apologized in June for the church’s role in the trauma the children experienced.
