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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) – The White House said Friday that President Joe Biden will force children into abusive Indian boarding schools, a 150-year campaign to destroy Native American culture, language and identity. He announced that he would apologize on behalf of the U.S. government.
More than 900 children have died in government-funded schools, the last of which closed or moved to other facilities decades ago. Their dark legacy continues to be felt in Indigenous communities grappling with the generational trauma of torture, sexual abuse and hatred endured by survivors.
Biden is expected to formally acknowledge the federal government’s role and apologize during an appearance at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.
Let’s take a closer look at the federal boarding school system.
150 years of forced assimilationCongress established the framework for a national boarding school system for Native Americans in 1819 under the fifth U.S. president, James Monroe, in a law known as the Indian Civilization Act. Its purpose is said to be to prevent the “final extinction of the Indian tribes” and to “introduce among them the customs and arts of civilization.”
The focus was on dismantling Native American families and severing the intergenerational bonds that kept their culture alive despite their forced removal to reservations.
Over the next 150 years, taxpayer-funded government and religious institutions operated at least 417 schools in 37 states. School staff worked to strip Indigenous children of their traditions and traditions. Teachers and administrators cut their hair, forbade them to speak their native language, and forced them to do manual labor.
By the 1920s, most school-age Native American children (about 60,000 at one time) were attending boarding schools run by the federal government or religious groups, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The highest concentrations of schools were in states with the largest Native American populations, including Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. But schools were located in every region of the country, and students, some as young as 4, were often sent to schools far from home.
The last school opened in 1969, the same year a Senate report declared the residential school system a national tragedy. The report found that they were grossly underfunded, academically inadequate, and had a “high emphasis” on discipline and punishment.
The policy of forced assimilation was finally formally repealed with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, 1978. However, despite this policy shift, the government did not conduct a full investigation into the residential school system until the Biden administration.
Survivors talk about abuse
A national review of the system was initiated in 2021 by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo and the country’s first indigenous cabinet member.
She and other Interior officials held intermittent listening sessions over two years on reservations across the country to allow school survivors and their relatives to tell their stories.
Former students described the harmful and often degrading treatment they endured at the hands of teachers and administrators while separated from their families. Their descendants spoke of trauma that has been passed down through generations and manifests itself in broken relationships, substance abuse, and other social problems that plague the reservation today.
Haaland’s grandparents were among them, and she was removed from her community when she was eight years old and forced to live in a Catholic boarding school until she was 13.
“Make no mistake: this is a concerted effort to eradicate the term ‘Indian problem,’ to either assimilate indigenous peoples or completely destroy them,” the agency’s findings said. Haaland said in July. The agency’s biggest recommendation was for the government to formally apologize.
Unmarked graves and repatriation
At least 973 Native American children died in the boarding system. Among them were an estimated 187 American Indian and Alaska Native children who died at the Carlisle Indian Technical School in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is currently the site of the U.S. Military War College. School officials continue to repatriate children, and just last month, the bodies of three children who died at the school were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.
A Ministry of Interior investigation found marked and unmarked graves at 65 boarding schools. Causes of death included illness and abuse. Officials said the number of children who died away from campus may have been higher after being sent home sick at school.
Schools, similar institutions, and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in federal spending, adjusted for inflation, officials determined. Religious and private institutions, which run many schools, received federal funding as partners in campaigns to “civilize” Indigenous students.
More than 200 of the schools receiving government support were religiously affiliated. The Boarding School Federation has identified more than 100 additional church-run schools that are not on the government’s list, but there is no evidence of federal support.
In June, Catholic bishops in the United States apologized for the church’s role in the trauma experienced by children.
