Biden to apologize for past U.S. policy on boarding schools for Indigenous children

U.S. President Joe Biden is scheduled to formally apologize on Friday to Indigenous people in the U.S. for the government’s role in the abuse and neglect of children sent to federal boarding schools to assimilate them into white society.

At least 973 Native American children died in the abusive boarding school system over a 150-year period that ended in 1969, according to an Interior Department investigation that called for a U.S. government apology and which said that death toll was likely a conservative estimate.

At least 18,000 children, some as young as four years of age, were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them.

“The Federal Indian Boarding School Era is one of the darkest chapters of American history,” Biden said in a post on X on Friday. “The trauma experienced in those institutions haunts our conscience to this very day.”

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, launched the investigation into the boarding school system, and she will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president as he delivers the speech Friday at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.

“It will be one of the high points of my entire life,” Haaland said on Thursday.

No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of the Indigenous children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or for the U.S. government’s actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Peoples.

The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilize” Indigenous people in the U.S. 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.

The U.S. government has offered apologies for other historic injustices, including to Japanese families it imprisoned during the Second World War. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to compensate tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Indigenous people in Hawaii for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But the gestures did not create pathways to reparations for Black Americans.

It’s unclear what action, if any, will follow Friday’s apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands.