Responses to President Biden's Apology to Native Americans Forced into Assimilation in Boarding Schools

President Biden issued a formal apology on Friday, October 25, 2024, for the United States’ 150-year-long system of federal Indian boarding schools, which forcibly separated Native children from their families with the purpose of severing their ties to their communities and cultural practices. 

At Gila Crossing Community School in Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community, President Biden delivered his historic acknowledgment of the role of the U.S. government in the forced assimilation of Native Americans as part of his first official visit to an Indigenous community as president.

“I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did,” said President Biden. “That’s long overdue.” The President described the federal Indian boarding school system as “one of the most horrific chapters in American history” and one that is not well known to Americans or taught in schools. “I believe it is important that we do know,” he said. “Generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they’d never met, who spoke a language they had never heard. . . . Their names literally erased, replaced by a number or an English name."

President Biden concluded his remarks by citing the words of anthropologist and Alaskan Native cultural leader Rosita Worl (Tlingit), who earlier this week was awarded a National Humanities Medal at the White House. As a six-year-old, Worl was kidnapped from her family and taken to a boarding school for Alaskan Native children. As an adult, she says that when she hears children singing Tlingit songs, “We will hear the voices of our ancestors, and we are now hearing it through our children.” 

“For too long this nation sought to silence the voices of Native children,” said Biden. “But now your voices are being heard.”

The federal government policy had a goal of total assimilation of Native people. This assimilation was to be achieved by separating children from families, banning the use of Native languages, and forcing children and young people to adopt Western practices, including insisting they give up their own spiritual ways to become Christians. During this period across several generations, many children were physically abused, sexually assaulted, malnourished, and mistreated.

A bill that would create the Truth and Healing Commission, with authority to subpoena records from church-run boarding schools, is pending in the U.S. Congress. Officials have been hoping to get it passed by the end of the year, but the likelihood of that appears uncertain.

A final investigative report on Indian boarding schools released in July by the Department of the Interior called for a formal apology from the U.S., but also issued other recommendations, including Congressional approval of a proposed Truth and Healing Commission to further investigate boarding schools, a national memorial to acknowledge those who endured the hardships, and financial support for tribal programs that include repatriation, education, mental health support and community rebuilding.

Speaking to the apology, Cheryl Crazy Bull, President and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, said, “The experiences of Native people with boarding schools touches nearly every Native American alive today. Yet this dark period in American history is largely unknown to non-Natives. I hope President Biden’s apology not only raises awareness of the true Native history in our country but is a step towards national reconciliation and healing.”

Many Indian Country leaders call for a substantial and sustainable investment by the federal government and philanthropy in restorative and healing approaches and institutions to repair the harm done by the boarding school era.

NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo)

NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) joined President Biden and Secretary Haaland at the Gila Crossing Community School and issued the following statement:

“This is an important day for our country and for all Native peoples. The forced assimilation policies of the U.S. federal boarding school system shattered families, devastated communities, and robbed Native tribes of their histories, cultures, and languages. I am grateful to President Biden for his recognition of the legacy of trauma these schools have left within Native communities. This is an important milestone for all of us in the path toward healing from this dark chapter of American history.”

The apology comes 16 years after former prime minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s residential school system. It follows an investigation of boarding schools driven by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the country’s first Indigenous cabinet secretary, which was prompted by the discovery of 215 suspected unmarked graves at a residential school site in Kamloops, B.C.

“The federal Indian boarding school policy and the pain it has caused will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history,” Biden said during a speech at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. “It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul.”

Former Assembly of First Nations national chief Phil Fontaine, who was one of the first Canadians to speak publicly about the abuse he experienced at a residential school, said Canada has had “tremendous influence” on the U.S. starting to reckon with its own history.

“The U.S. government could no longer turn a blind eye to the boarding school experience in the United States,” he said. “And they ultimately decided that this was the right thing to do, and it certainly is.”

“It was a dark chapter, unknown to most Canadians, but it’s become very much part of Canadian history that’s been exposed to more Canadians than ever before,” Fontaine said. “And I believe that’s entirely possible in the U.S. as well.”

Fontaine said the United States should now launch its own truth and reconciliation commission, as Canada did in 2008, and should look at compensating residential school survivors.

Stephanie Scott, executive director of Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, said Biden’s apology is positive, but “only a first step.”

“There is a long road ahead to address the ongoing harms, reparations, and continuous revelations of truth to achieve reconciliation,” she said in a statement, adding that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can serve as a model for other countries.

In response to President Biden’s apology for the U.S. government’s role in forcing Indigenous children into assimilationist boarding schools for more than 150 years, Indigenous Episcopal leaders, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, and House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris offer the following statement:

“The Episcopal Church welcomes President Biden’s apology today while recognizing that our own journey of truth-telling and reconciliation continues. Through General Convention Resolution A127 and Executive Council Resolution MW062, we have committed $2.5 million to a comprehensive investigation of our church’s role in the boarding school system.

The Episcopal Church must fully understand its role and involvement in boarding schools. That is why we are pursuing a thorough fact-finding process while supporting community-based healing initiatives led by Indigenous communities. We continue to pray for all Indigenous children who were in residential boarding schools—those who died there, those who survived, and their descendants who still carry this legacy. As we say in our Prayer to Remember the Innocents, “We will always remember them.”

For Dolores Jimerson, Seneca, Bear Clan, the apology brought a flood of memories.

“It was very healing to watch the apology, also very emotional,” said Jimerson, the behavioral health education director for the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board. “I was moved to tears as memories of the stories my father and other family shared over the years about their experiences at boarding school came flooding through my tears.”

In addition to winning passage of the Truth and Healing commission, Nick Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and the chief executive and founder of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy group, provided a list of demands Friday for the Biden administration to follow up with after the apology. Tilsen called for rescinding Medals of Honor given to U.S. Army members for the Wounded Knee Massacre, working to make unprecedented investments into Indigenous language and education; and launching an investigation into the Tuba City Boarding School, an Arizona school operated by the Bureau of Indian Education where students have alleged sexual and physical abuse by teachers.

He also called for release from prison of Leonard Peltier, who is currently serving two consecutive life sentences in connection with the deaths of two FBI agents in South Dakota in 1975. The Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe elder is serving his time in the Coleman I Maximum Security Prison in Coleman, Florida, and was denied parole earlier this year. He has long maintained his innocence.

Doug Kanentiio George, writer, author and former residential school survivor stated, On October 25 Ranatakaiius, President Joe Biden, gave the most powerful speech ever delivered by a Chief Executive when he extended an official apology on behalf of all Americans for those Native children take and placed in the 450 boarding schools in the US. He did not temporize his words but was brutal in his description of the physical, mental and sexual abuse suffered by the children by supervisors free from any constraint. I was shocked by his honesty and the brutality of what he said. I never expected any President to speak with such passion…

More needs to be done. We need to learn from omissions of the Canadian experience. We need to acknowledge that at the heart of the boarding schools was territorial displacement and cultural extinction. We need programs that are created from the ground up, that the victims need to define what works best for them…

We need a tribunal to hear testimony from the victims. We need to compel the abusers to respond accordingly. We need the application of federal laws to bring to justice those individuals and institutions which administered to the schools. We need complete access to the records of the churches and agencies so we can determine who was taken and what happened to them. We need forensic investigators to locate the unmarked graves and determine the cause of death for the thousands who lie beneath disturbed soils. We need support to hold conferences across the country to share information, develop strategies for repatriation of the remains of the children and to establish probable cause as to the criminal acts leading to their deaths.

To us, the few remaining survivors, it is not about monetary reparations but to stimulate true healing by having our children returned to us for decent burials where they may be embraced by their families. It is about creating a "land back" directive in which lost areas are returned to us…

It begins with an apology, a statement of regret and sorrow. President Biden did just that. Maybe now the restless ghosts of the Washington family can find their own peace.

Rick Oakes, director of the local residential school organization Akwesasne Sonatanoron "The People of Akwesasne Are Still Here,” stated, “Mr. Biden’s apology was long overdue to the indigenous people’s here on Turtle Island. We are glad that they acknowledge their federal policies to eradicate Indigenous people, and we hope that they will compensate the families whose children were stolen, and to compensate the survivors who are still here.