PHOENIX – President Joe Biden issued an apology on Friday United States policy of forcibly separating generations of indigenous children For more than 150 years, they were separated from their families and sent to federally supported boarding schools for forced assimilation.
“I formally apologize for what we did as president of the United States of America,” Biden said in a scathing speech. “It’s long overdue.”
The president’s apology comes after a years-long investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to serve as Cabinet secretary. Haaland’s grandparents were separated from their family due to politics.
“We know the federal government has failed,” Haaland said in emotional remarks before Biden was introduced. “It could not destroy our languages, our traditions, our way of life. It could not destroy us because we were patient,” he said.
The investigation revealed generations of trauma. determined at least 973 deaths Native American, Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian children attending boarding schools. In all, the study identified 417 institutions in 37 states or then-territories operating from 1819 to at least 1969.
“Many Indian children have been subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse in these institutions,” the report said. He confirmed there were at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 school sites.
“The federal Indian boarding school policy, the pain it caused, will always be a significant shame, a stain on American history,” Biden said.
The president’s apology comes more than two years later Pope Francis issued a similar apology On behalf of the Catholic church for similar abuses in Canada. More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend Canadian boarding schools.
Alex White Plume, 73, a former president of the Oglala Sioux tribe who attended two boarding schools in South Dakota, told NBC News that he will not accept the president’s apology.
“I don’t see any way we can accept this because it doesn’t change anything,” White Plume said.
“We have to survive and to survive we have to take back our territories so that we can take back our language and perform the rituals that are specific to the places in our territory,” he said. “That’s why I don’t want to accept apologies. I want them to be meaningful. If it’s a meaningful apology, he would say, OK, we’re going to investigate the genocide and establish a process to create protocols on how to go about it. I think that kind of it would make more sense.”
While Biden’s apology was welcomed by most of the crowd in Phoenix on Friday morning, one protester said it wasn’t enough.
A placard held by a guarded demonstrator during the President’s speech reads: “There are still babies in mass graves, your apology means nothing.”