By james art “I never would have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna.
“It’s a big deal for me. I’m sure it will be a big deal for all of Indian Country.”
Shortly after becoming the first Indian to head the Ministry of the Interior, Ms Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system.
At least 18,000 children, some as young as four, were found to have been taken from their parents and forced to attend assimilationist schools in an attempt to dispossess their tribal nations of land.
It also documents nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 burial sites associated with more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forcible removal of Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children—an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations—or any other aspect of the U.S. government’s extermination of indigenous peoples .
During the second phase of its investigation, the Department of Internal Affairs conducted wiretapping sessions and collected testimony from survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgment and apology for the boarding school era.
Ms Haaland said she took this to Mr Biden, who agreed it was necessary.
Ms Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend boarding school, said she was honored to play a role, along with her staff, to help make the apology a reality.
She will join Mr. Biden on his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech. “This will be one of the high points of my entire life,” she said.
It is unclear what, if any, action will follow the apology.
The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands, and many tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has refused to follow federal law governing the return of Native American remains when it comes to for those still buried at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
“President Biden’s apology is an important moment for Native people in this country,” Cherokee Nation Director Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“Our children have been made to live in a world that has erased their identity, their culture and turned their spoken language upside down,” Mr Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools attended by thousands of our Cherokee children. To this day, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation feels the impact in some way.”
In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating Indigenous people and forcing their children into assimilation boarding schools, an apology by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 was followed by a truth-finding and reconciliation process and the injection of billions of dollars into the First nations to deal with the devastation left by government policies.
There is no such commission in the US. A truth-and-reconciliation bill was introduced last year by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but it remains in the Senate.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “disastrous” Indigenous residential school policy, saying the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into Christian society has destroyed their cultures, separated families and marginalized generations.
“I am deeply sorry,” Francis told school survivors and local community members gathered in Alberta.