President Biden officially apologizes for the Native American boarding school

TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – President Joe Biden’s visit to Arizona was about something the country tried to ignore for decades.

He apologized for the federal indian boarding school era which spanned 150 years and ended almost 50 years ago.

Biden told the crowd at the Gila River Indian Community that the country must fully acknowledge the past to usher in a new era of federal-tribal relations.

“My apologies! As President of the United States of America, I formally apologize for what we did!” the president exclaimed as the crowd cheered.

Biden’s apology also acknowledged how thousands of children from Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities were taken to more than 500 boarding schools far from their homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to assimilate them and remove their culture. The abuse was widespread and as many as a thousand died.

There were three such schools in southern Arizona and there is a national map HERE.

“These federal Indian boarding schools have impacted every Native person I know,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland told the crowd.

Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, brought the results of an Interior Department investigation to Biden, who agreed the apology was necessary.

‘It took a long, long, way too long. Frankly, there is no excuse that it took 50 years to make this apology,” Biden said.

“You can’t change the past, but at least we heard the words, you can’t change the past or what happened, but the apology is good, it’s appropriate,” Gila River tribal member Ivan Whitman said. Indian Community.

Whitman said he knows the stories of children who spend their childhoods without their parents.

While the past can’t change, Biden hopes to help in the future.

“For God’s sake, we’re finally modernizing tribal infrastructure,” Biden told a cheering crowd.

He pointed to billions of dollars for internet connections, as well as physical bridges and roads on tribal lands and the restructuring of federal funding to defer tribal decision-making. The change shows confidence in the judgment of indigenous peoples on a day when the president apologized for the nation’s judgment failure that has lasted generations.

“That’s who we are, for God’s sake. Let’s make sure we reach out and embrace it, because you make us stronger. You are America. God bless you all and may God protect our troops. Thank you,” Biden concluded.

Haaland also said an oral collection of first-person accounts from boarding school survivors is being created.

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