Sam Cabral
US correspondent

image source, Reuters

About 20 minutes later, President Joe Biden said, issue a formal presidential apology To Native Americans for the U.S. government’s role in operating boarding schools.

From the early 1800s to the 1960s, thousands of Native children were removed from their families and homes and sent to boarding schools intended to erase their cultural heritage and assimilate them into white American culture.

There were more than 500 such schools, funded by the government and mostly run by churches.

Biden will speak at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona in his first visit to Native reservations as president.

“I never in a million years would have predicted something like this would happen,” Deb Haaland, Biden’s Secretary of the Interior and the first Native cabinet member in U.S. history, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

“I’m confident this will be a big event for all of Indian Country.”

A study initiated by Haaland found that at least 18,000 Native American and Alaska Native children were taken from their parents in the 19th and 20th centuries. Close to 1,000 deaths have been documented, but the figure is estimated to be much higher.