President Formally Apologizes for U.S. Native American Boarding School Program
On October 25, President Joe Biden visited the Laveen Village near Phoenix, Arizona. He spoke at the Gila River Crossing School in the Gila River Indian Community. This is the home of the O’odham and the Pee-Posh Native American people. In his speech, President Biden apologized to the Native American community for the government’s Indian Boarding School program, which tore apart Native families for more than a century. Here, btw takes a closer look at the Boarding School program, as well as President Biden’s apology and what it means.
What Was the Boarding School Program?
For 150 years, the U.S. government ran more than 400 boarding schools that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents. Most of the schools were in Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas. But they existed in 37 states and in every region of the country. At these schools, Native American children were forced to learn English and assimilate into American culture. They were often abused and tortured, and nearly 1,000 of them died.
The History of the Boarding School System
How did this boarding school program come to be? In 1819, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act. The legislation’s goal was to assimilate Native Americans into U.S. culture, language, and habits. To do that, the federal government began breaking up Native families and partnered with religious institutions to force Native children into boarding schools. There, children as young as four years old were made to cut their hair, learn English, and perform manual labor.
![Chir[i]cahua Apaches as they looked upon their arrival to a boarding school.](https://mhebtw.mheducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/111124_001P_IS.jpg)
By the 1920s, up to 60,000 Native children were attending one of these boarding schools. This continued until 1969, when a Senate report described the boarding school system as a national tragedy. The same year, the last boarding school opened. But the program didn’t officially end until 1978, when Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act.
![Chir[i]cahua Apache Indians after four months of living at the boarding school.](https://mhebtw.mheducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/111124_002P_IS.jpg)
This national tragedy went unacknowledged by most Americans until 2021. That year, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the country’s first Native American Cabinet member, launched a nationwide investigation. Haaland’s own grandparents were forced into Catholic boarding schools, where they lived from age 8 to age 13. From 2021 to 2023, Haaland and her team held listening sessions across the country to allow survivors and their descendants to tell their stories. In July 2024, the team’s findings were released in an official report.
The Agency’s Report
Through their listening sessions, Haaland and other officials learned that many survivors, as well as their children and grandchildren, suffer from trauma that has been passed down through the generations. Often, this generational trauma can lead to problems such as substance abuse and difficulty with forming healthy relationships.
The investigation made other discoveries as well. It uncovered both marked and unmarked graves at the sites of 65 boarding schools. Most of the children in the graves had died from disease and abuse.
The agency made several recommendations for what the government could do to try to make up for what happened. Some of these recommendations included building a national monument, investing in additional services for survivors and their families, and reducing tuition rates for Native American students attending U.S. state-funded colleges and universities. But according to the agency’s findings, the most important thing that the government could do would be to formally apologize.
President Biden’s Apology
In June 2024, the Catholic church apologized for its role in the boarding school program. But before now, the federal government has never formally apologized for what happened. In his speech on October 25, President Biden made an official apology. He talked about how being an American means recognizing and speaking about both the good and the bad parts of American history.