On Friday, President Biden issued an apology over Native American boarding schools, which were a U.S. policy for a century-and-a-half, forcibly removing children from their tribes and cultural roots.
“The federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened, until today. I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologize,” Biden said at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona on Friday.
“I have a solemn responsibility to be the first president to formally apologize to the Native people,” he continued. “It’s long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there’s no excuse this apology took 50 years to make.”
Biden became the first president to make such an apology during his initial diplomatic visit to any tribal nation during his presidency.
“As time moved on, respect for tribal sovereignty evaporated. It was shattered,” he lamented. “Targeting children to cut their connections to their ancestors and their inheritances.”
Biden also recounted the federal government’s history of child removal mandates spanning 150 years, describing it as “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.
We should be ashamed,” he remarked. “The vast majority of Americans don’t know about it.”
Native American boarding schools were operational between 1819 and 1969, where tens of thousands of Native children attended institutions operated collaboratively by the government and certain churches.
“Generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they never met, that spoke a language they’d never heard,” Biden added.
“Children would arrive at schools, their clothes taken off, their hair they were told was sacred was chopped off, their names literally erased.”
He noted that the policy survived the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and entire “generations [are] living with that trauma.”
Watch his speech here:
