‘Too shameful to acknowledge’: Biden delivers historic apology for Indian boarding schools

Standing solemnly in front of a crowd full of Indigenous people on the grassy field of a tribal elementary school near Phoenix, President Joe Biden issued a formal apology to Indigenous communities across the country for the role the United States government had in the Native American Boarding School system, a system that harmed Indigenous people for generations.

“After 150 years, the United States government eventually stopped the program, but the federal government has never formally apologized for what happened,” Biden said. “Until today — I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did.”

Biden’s apology was met with loud cheers from the crowd. He is the first sitting president in the last 10 years to visit a Tribal Nation.

He told the community that it was long overdue and that it was only fitting that it was given at a tribal school within an Indigenous community deeply connected to culture and tradition.

“I have a solemn responsibility to be the first president to formally apologize to the Native peoples, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans and federal Indian boarding schools,” he said. “It’s long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took (150) years to make.

Biden said the pain that the federal Indian boarding school policy has caused will always be a significant mark of shame for the United States.

“For those who went through this period, it was too painful to speak of,” he said. “For a nation, it was too shameful to acknowledge.”

“This formal apology is the culmination of decades of work by so many courageous people,” Biden said, acknowledging many who were sitting in the audience, including the boarding school survivors and descendants.

“I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Biden said. “But, today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”

Biden’s apology, delivered Friday at the Gila River Crossing School on the Gila River Indian Community, comes three years after Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched the first ever federal investigation into Native American Boarding Schools.

Haaland spoke before Biden, and was welcomed to the stage by Miss Gila River Susanna Osife as “Auntie Deb.” Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, told the crowd that thinking about our ancestors today is important because they persevered, and their stories are everywhere.

“We tell those stories because Native American history is American history,” Haaland said.

The Department of Interior released the final boarding school report in July. It provided eight recommendations from the Department of Indian Affairs for 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 policies that have harmed — and continue to harm — Indigenous peoples across the country.

“Today is a day for remembering, but it’s also a day to celebrate our perseverance,” Haaland said. “In spite of everything that has happened, we are still here.”

While boarding schools are places where affluent families send their children for an exclusive education for most of the United States, Haaland noted how different the prospect was for Native Americans.

“For Indigenous peoples, they served as places of trauma and terror for more than 100 years,” she said. “Tens of thousands of Indigenous children as young as four years old were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools run by U.S. government institutions.”

Haaland said that the federal Native American Boarding School system has impacted every Indigenous person she knows, and they all carry the trauma that those policies and schools inflicted.

“This is the first time in history that a United States cabinet secretary has shared the traumas of our past, and I acknowledge that this trauma was perpetrated by the agency that I now lead,” Haaland said. “For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books, but now our administration’s work will ensure that no one will ever forget.”

Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021 to shed light on the “horrific era of our nation’s history.”

The initiative compiled two reports and visited dozens of Indigenous communities, hearing from survivors and descendants so that their experiences are all documented because the goal of Native American Boarding Schools was to assimilate and eradicate Indigenous people.

Haaland said the investigation into these boarding schools are shared in those reports and it shows the “loud and unequivocal truth” that the federal government took deliberate and strategic actions through boarding school policies to isolate Indigenous children from their families and steal from them the languages, cultures, and traditions that are fundamental to Indigenous people.

“As we stand here together, my friends and relatives, we know that the federal government failed,” She said. “It failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways. It failed to destroy us because we persevered.”

The Federal Boarding School Initiative’s report called on Congress and federal agencies to take action, and Haaland said that some of those recommendations are already being put into effect.

For instance, Haaland said the department is working alongside the departments of Education and Health and Human Services to invest in the preservation of Native languages.

“We are developing a 10-year national plan guided by tribal leaders and Native language teachers,” Haaland said, and more details about their efforts will be released later.

“The painful loss of our Indigenous languages has been a consistent topic as we have met with survivors across our nation,” she said.

Another effort Haaland highlighted is the department’s collaboration with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to create an oral collection of first-person narratives from boarding school survivors.

Haaland said this collaboration is a way to ensure that future generations are told the stories of the boarding school era and understand the impacts and intergenerational trauma caused by boarding school policies.

As the crowd listened to Biden give his speech, protesters with O’odham Solidarity made their voice heard as one walked toward the stage holding a sign calling for justice for Palestinians.

As Biden delivered his remarks, one protester yelled from the crowd: “No, what about the people in Gaza.”

The protest was met with shouts from the crowd as a man in the crowd yelled: “Get out of here.” But Biden said let her talk.

“Let her go,” Biden said as the protester was being removed. “There’s a lot of innocent people being killed and it has to stop.”

Even after the protestors voiced their concerns, the community’s attention went back to Biden as he continued his speech about the boarding school years as well as his investments to Indian Country.

‘It was long overdue’

Crystalyne Curley said she thought of her grandfathers as Biden delivered his apology, which brought back memories of the stories they would tell of their time at boarding schools and the trauma they experienced.

“It’s a bittersweet moment,” Curley said. “I think there is a lot of a mix of emotions, because each of our Navajo citizens has a tie to the trauma that has happened within our boarding schools.”

Curley serves as speaker of the Navajo Nation Council and has heard stories about the federal boarding school system from her community for generations.

“It was long overdue,” Curley said. “I really commend our president Biden for taking that step and being the first one to have that courage to say, ‘Yes, we done wrong.’”

Curley said that is something that many Indigenous people have been waiting to hear, including the Navajo people.

“Many of our children didn’t come home,” she said, and the policies’ lingering effects include the loss of language and culture.

The Department of the Interior investigated the federal Indian boarding school system across the United States, identifying more than 400 schools and over 70 burial sites.

Arizona was home to 47 of those schools, which were attended by Indigenous children who were taken away from their families and attempted to assimilate them through education — and, often, physical punishment.

The legacy of the federal Indian boarding school system is not new to Indigenous people. For centuries, Indigenous people across the country have experienced the loss of their culture, traditions, language and land.

Multiple federally operated boarding schools were established in the Navajo Nation in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and many of them are still operational today, though under different policies than when they were constructed.

Curley said that there are still a lot of federally operated Bureau of Indian Education schools in operation on the Navajo Nation, but some families still hesitate to enroll their children in them because of the boarding school history.

She hopes that this apology will lead to the federal government investing in the education system within tribal nations.

“Start investing back into our children and our mental, spiritual, (and) psychological health that this has caused for many decades,” she added.

Curley said she hopes that the momentum of Biden’s apology will be carried on into the next administration by acknowledging the wrong done to Indigenous communities.

Now that an official apology has been given, Curley said that healing needs to take place and that comes in the form of investing in Indigenous communities, something she said is best done by funding public and mental health resources, as well as reinvesting in the culture and language revitalizations within their communities.

“For healing to take place, it takes at least two generations,” Curley said.