I am a direct descendant Number of family members forced to attend a U.S. government-run or church-run Indian boarding school as children. These include my mother, all four of my grandparents, and most of my great-grandparents.

On October 25, 2024, Joe Biden, the first US president to formally apologize for his policy of sending Native American children to boarding schools in India, described it as “one of the most made.”“Horrible chapters in US history” and “a sign of shame.” However, he did not describe it as genocide.

But over the last 10 years, many historians and Indigenous scholars have said this is what happened in Indian residential schools:fits the definition of genocide.”

From the 19th to the 20th centuries, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without their parents’ permission. Purpose of these schools It was to deprive Native American children of their Native names, languages, religions, and cultural practices.

The U.S. government directly operates or subsidizes boarding schools Christian churches to govern them. Historians and scientists have written about this. History of Indian residential schools for decades. But as Biden noted, “most Americans don’t know This is history.”

aspect domestic scientist As someone who studies indigenous history and the descendants of residential school survivors in India, I know the “horrible” history of residential schools in India from both survivors and scholars who claim they were sites of genocide.

Was it genocide?

The United Nations defines “genocide”“Intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Scholars have investigated different cases of genocide against Indigenous peoples in the United States.

Historian Jeffery OstlerIn his 2019 book “Surviving the HolocaustIt argues that the unlawful annexation of indigenous peoples’ lands, the deportation of indigenous peoples, and the numerous deaths of children and adults that occurred while walking hundreds of kilometers from their homelands in the 19th century constitute genocide.

After the mass murders of indigenous peoples Gold was discovered in the 19th century Historian writes that what is now California also constitutes genocide Benjamin Madley In his 2017 book “An American Holocaust.” At that time, a massive migration of new settlers to California to mine for gold brought with it the killing and displacement of Native peoples.

Other scholars have focused on the forced assimilation of children in residential schools in India. Sociologist Andrew Woolford argues that scholars should start calling what happened in Indian residential schools in the 19th and 20th centuries “genocide” because of the “sheer destructiveness of these institutions.”

Woolford, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, explains in his 2015 book:This Charitable ExperimentThe purpose of residential schools in India was stated to be “the forcible conversion of multiple Indigenous peoples so that they cease to exist as a (real or perceived) obstacle to settler colonial domination of the continent.”