President Joe Biden will make a formal apology on Friday for atrocities carried out against Native American children in boarding schools supported by the federal government in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The formal acknowledgment of the U.S. government's role in facilitating these schools — which often forcibly removed children from their homes and stripped them of their native heritage — will come during remarks the president is set to give at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.
Deb Haaland, secretary of the Department of Interior, told Scripps News the apology carries significant weight for many Native Americans like her who have a personal history with the boarding schools.
"I almost can't put it into words what it will mean to me. My grandparents were taken away to boarding school, so I understand and have experienced how that terrible era affected my own family," Haaland said.
"For so many years, it seemed like Indian Country was invisible. Folks looked at us as if we were living in the past. Now they recognize that, yes, we have whole, full communities who stayed intact and persevered through all of the terrible assimilation policies of this country. And it will be wonderful for folks across the country to feel that the president sees them and that he listened," she added.
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The schools aimed to assimilate Native American children and were often run by religious organizations with federal funding. Children were removed from their homes and sent to schools far away where they were stripped of their Indigenous clothing and names and were forbidden from speaking their native languages. Conditions were often brutal, and many children died from illness or abuse.
"I never went into boarding school, but I have suffered the passed-down trauma, the associated trauma that has stemmed from the boarding school era," Lynnette Grey Bull of the Northern Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming told Scripps News. Grey Bull's father, Myron, her aunt and several other family members were among those forcibly taken from their homes during that period.
"My father, my grandparents and my ancestors before them have passed away, they have journeyed on, but during their lifetime they were never able to say, 'I suffered a traumatic event such as the boarding school,'" she added. "It was never acknowledged, not only for themselves, but from the US government."
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In July, the Department of the Interior issued its final report from its investigation into federal Indian boarding schools. The report identified 417 institutions across 37 states or then-territories and confirmed at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending federally operated or supported schools.
The report also identified at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 different school sites.
The apology is the first step in a series of recommendations laid out by the Department of the Interior. Other steps include establishing a national memorial, repatriating remains of children who never returned from the boarding schools and returning former boarding school lands to Indian tribes.
According to Grey Bull, significant federal funding for impacted communities is necessary to right these past wrongs.
"President Biden making an apology statement, I think it's long overdue," Grey Bull said. "It's time for more than just acknowledgment. We need real funding and resources to help us initiate healing within our own communities."
Haaland noted her department's recommendations are steps toward making these communities whole again.
"Folks may not realize that when they split families apart and took children hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away from their homes, some of those children never came back. Some of those children were never returned to their communities where they could live full lives or continue the culture and traditions of those communities. So, there is a lot with that we need to do," she said.
