President Joe Biden on Friday issued an impassioned, historic apology for one of the “most horrific parts” of the United States: separating Native American children from their families and placing them in abusive boarding schools with the goal of destroying their culture.

From 1819 to the 1970s, the United States operated hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to inadvertently assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forcibly Christianizing them.

A recent government report revealed heartbreaking cases of physical, mental and sexual abuse, as well as the estimated deaths of nearly 1,000 children; The real number is thought to be quite high.

“As president of the United States, I formally apologize for our actions,” he said in a speech to the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona, that alternated between impassioned and deeply emotional.

He added that the school system’s nearly 150-year existence has been “one of the most horrific chapters in American history” and “a sin on our soul.”

“I know that no apology can make up for or make up for what was lost during the darkness of federal residential school policy,” he continued. “Today we are finally moving towards the light.”

Biden briefly interrupted a protester denouncing civilian deaths in the Gaza conflict, in which the United States serves as Israel’s main arms supplier, but told the crowd to let him speak.

“Too many innocent people are being killed and this needs to be stopped,” he said.

Biden was joined by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, who struck a defiant tone as she recalled that her own maternal grandparents were “stolen from their community and forced to live in a Catholic school.”

Federal authorities “failed to destroy our languages, our traditions, our ways of life,” he continued. “Despite everything that has happened, we are still here!”

The Biden administration has made significant investments in Native American communities through executive actions that expand tribal autonomy, directing agencies to prioritize gender-based violence, designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites, and more.

The apology follows official statements in Canada, where thousands of children have died in similar residential schools, and in other countries around the world where historical abuses of indigenous peoples are increasingly recognised.

– It’s hard to apologize –

In all, there were more than 400 schools in 37 states or territories, most of them church-run.

Indigenous children were forced into a policy that activists call cultural genocide to “civilize” them; this brutal agenda was summed up in the phrase “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”

Navajo Nation elder and healer Emerson Gorman told AFP in a 2020 interview that he was taken from his family when he was just five years old.

At boarding school, boys were forced to cut off their long braids, forbidden to speak their own language, told their religion was “bad” and pressured to convert to Catholicism.

Official apologies for the country’s past wrongs are rare.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation providing reparations to more than 100,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of the mid-20th century, in which hundreds of Black men were deliberately untreated for syphilis to learn how the disease progressed.

In 2016, Barack Obama became the first president to visit Hiroshima, where the United States dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945, but stopped short of making a formal apology.

And in 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives apologized for 246 years of African-American slavery and the racist Jim Crow laws that followed. The Senate passed a similar resolution the next year.

But the congress’ apologies did not include reparations for the descendants of slaves.

ia/acb