President Joe Biden apologized on Friday for the atrocities carried out against Native American children in boarding schools supported by the federal government. Calling it one of the most horrific chapters in American history, Biden told a group at the Gila River Indian Community, "I formally apologize as the president of the United States of America for what we did ... it's long overdue."
"Quite frankly, there's no excuse that this apology took over 50 years to make," President Biden added.
A report issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior states that 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending the boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The report also identified at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at dozens of school sites.
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The 417 institutions across 37 states or then-territories were meant to assimilate Native American children and were often run by religious organizations with federal funding.
According to World Without Genocide (link), more than 60,000 children in the United States were forcibly taken from their families and moved to boarding schools, often hundreds of miles from the children’s families and communities.
They were then stripped of their Indigenous clothing and names, and forbidden from speaking their native languages.
Jeff Stiffarm, president of the Fort Belknap reservation, said of the apology: "It's better late than never. This should have happened a long time ago."
Stiffarm's reaction is shared by many Native Americans, who had an even closer connection to boarding schools, like Richard Littlebear, a Northern Cheyenne tribal member.
"It was centuries too late. I'm glad that Biden was doing that, but it was centuries too late," says Littlebear.
Littlebear attended a residential school in Busby until the seventh grade. He says that the treatment he experienced was less severe than most generations before him. However, he still remembers multiple incidents of physical abuse.
"For me, it was getting hit on the back with a newspaper. I don't know what it was called, but they used to carry a newspaper with them," he said.
Littlebear says he was a troublemaker in school and would often get punished. Looking back now, he says the punishments were too extreme for the behavior.
"I would bring it more teachers who are more interested in what they're teaching, rather than what they could punish students," he said.
Littlebear, and Charlene Sleeper, whose great-grandmother attended boarding school, say that almost every single Native American either has experienced this mistreatment firsthand or knows someone who has.
"Unfortunately (my great grandmother) was subjected to pretty abusive circumstances when she was there. We don't know if she intentionally or unintentionally decided to speak her language, and she was punished for that," Sleeper said in a September interview with MTN News.
"When my mom and dad grew up they weren't allowed to speak their language... Some children stayed there and died there, and some of them ran away back to the reservation," said Charlotte Lamebull, a CFO at the Fork Belknap Indian Community.
Lamebull also has close connections to boarding schools. Her father and grandfather attended a residential school, and the remains of one of her relatives were returned home to Montana last month. Her relative, Almeda Heavy Hair, died at 16 years old at an Indian boarding school in Pennslyvania.
In an interview with Scripps News prior to Biden's apology, Deb Haaland, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior, talked about why this issue was personal to her.
"My grandparents were taken away to boarding school, so I understand and have experienced how that terrible era affected my own family," she said.
Biden praised Haaland on Friday, saying it's important that she's leading the department that once was responsible for the atrocities.
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