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President Biden on Friday will formally apologize for the role of the federal government in running boarding schools where thousands of Native American children faced abuse, neglect and the erasure of their tribal identities.
“I’m heading to do something that should have been done a long time ago, to make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday as he departed the White House for Phoenix, where he will address the Gila River Indian Community on Friday.
The trip is Mr. Biden’s first visit to a Native American reservation as president, and the first time an American president has apologized for the abuses that happened on the federal government’s watch over more than a century. From the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the U.S. government removed Native children from their families and homes and sent them to boarding schools for the purpose of erasing their tribal ties and cultural practices.
“For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books,” said Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American interior secretary, who joined the president on Air Force One to Arizona. “But now our administration’s work will ensure no one will ever forget.”
Ms. Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo citizen, was emotional as she recounted how members of her own family were sent to federally run Indian boarding schools. At one time, she said, the idea that the government would apologize to survivors and descendants was “far-fetched.”
Mr. Biden is expected to speak about legislation he has signed that has delivered more than $45 billion in federal money toward tribal nations and particularly infrastructure and health systems on reservations. The Gila River Indian Community outside of Phoenix has received more than $80 million in federal funds to build a pipeline to irrigate crops amid drought conditions.
With just weeks left before the presidential election, Democrats have been making an effort to woo Native American voters. Arizona is one of seven key battleground states that could put Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump over the threshold of 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
Native Americans make up over 6 percent of the state’s population, but about a quarter of the state is designated as tribal land.
At least 19,000 Native children were sent to schools, and nearly 1,000 died while attending them, according to an investigative report the Interior Department released in July as part of a search for the possible remains of Native American children at schools nationwide.
The department conducted interviews with hundreds of survivors who described widespread sexual and physical abuse at the schools. Others described lasting feelings of abandonment and shame from having their family connections severed when they were taken away to attend the schools.
The report from July called on the federal government to apologize and take steps that include creating a national memorial to commemorate the children’s deaths and educate the public; investing in research and helping Native communities heal from intergenerational stress and trauma; and revitalizing Native languages.
While other nations, like Canada, have continued to grapple with their treatment of Indigenous people, they have been years ahead of the United States in acknowledging the government’s role. In 2008, Canada’s prime minister first apologized for the country’s residential schools, admitting that they were part of a policy to forcibly assimilate. Critics say the United States still has considerable work to do to repair the generations of damage caused by its own boarding schools for Native children.
“This long-awaited apology is another step in the right direction, but the United States must now fulfill its affirmative obligations to take real action and give effect to this apology,” said Beth Wright, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and lawyer for the Native American Rights Fund who worked on boarding school cases.
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