President Joe Biden has announced that he will issue a formal apology for the forced removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools for more than 150 years in the United States.
After becoming the first Native American to head the agency, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland initiated an .
US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system. Credit: The New Yorker
The investigation found that at least 18,000 children, some as young as
four, were taken from their families and tribal nations of their land.
The boarding schools coerced the children to learn English, practise Christianity and trained them to work as domestic servants or labourers in white households.
President Biden’s apology will be the first formal acknowledgement by a US government of the country’s role in atrocities against Native children, with no president ever formally apologising for the forced removal of Native American, Alaskan Native, or Native Hawaiian children.
“In making this apology, the President acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful,” the White House said in a statement.
“And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated.”
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr told AP that this is a historic moment.
“President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country,” he said.
“Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language.
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. says every Cherokee Nation citizen still feels the impact of the boarding school policy. Credit: Cherokee Nation
“Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact.”
In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for assimilation policies, including the forced removal of children.
