Washington, Oct 25 (EFE). – United States President Joe Biden apologized Friday on behalf of the government for the atrocities committed against Indigenous children in hundreds of public boarding schools, where they were deprived of their language and culture and, in many cases, neglected and abused.
“For Indigenous peoples, they served as places of trauma and terror for more than 100 years. Tens of thousands of Indigenous children, as young as four years old were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools run by the US government and religious institutions,” Biden said during an event in the Gila River Indian community in Arizona.
“I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did,” he said, adding: “It comes too late. There is no excuse for this apology to have been 50 years in coming.”
Between 1819 and 1969, thousands of Native American children were forced to attend boarding schools run by churches and religious organizations with public funds to forcibly assimilate them into white society.
“Native children at these schools endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and, as detailed in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report by the Department of the Interior (DOI), at least 973 children died in these schools,” the White House said.
Biden was joined at the act by his Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in the US government, whose grandparents and one of her great-grandparents were forced to attend these boarding schools far away from home.
She called the schools a source of “trauma and terror” for more than a century and pledged federal resources to preserve Native languages.
“Today is a day for remembering, but it’s also a day to celebrate our perseverance. Despite everything that has happened, we are still here,” Haaland said.
“Indigenous peoples have always been here, and today we commit to our shared future,” she added.
Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo (New Mexico), launched an investigation into the boarding schools three years ago, which was released in July.
As a result of the investigation, graves, some unidentified, were found at 65 of the more than 400 boarding schools.
The Department of the Interior formally called on the government to apologize for the trauma inflicted on generations of Indian children.
The visit comes less than two weeks to go before the Nov. 5 elections as Biden seeks to forge his legacy before leaving the White House in January 2025. EFE
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