Apology to Native Americans for boarding school atrocities, but no remediation

US media reporting that "President Biden will issue a formal presidential apology to the Native American community for atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples during the era of federal Indian boarding schools, he announced Thursday. The apology is set to be issued in Arizona on Friday, according to a source familiar with the president's announcement. 

"I'm heading to do something that should have been done a long time ago," Mr. Biden told reporters before boarding Marine One on Thursday afternoon. "Make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years."

From 1819 through the 1970s, the federal government established and supported Indian boarding schools throughout the country to assimilate Alaska Native, American Indian and Native Hawaiian children into White American culture by forcibly removing them from their families, communities and belief systems. Many children who attended these boarding schools endured emotional and physical abuse, and some died, the Department of the Interior detailed."

Some of the documented atrocities

At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by Interior Department officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.

The investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools where Native American children were forcibly assimilated into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but officials said the causes of death included disease and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969.

Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said.

The tip of the iceberg

Leaders of Indigenous communities in the Americas think that "the truth about the U.S. Indian boarding school policy has largely been written out of the history books. There were more than 523 government-funded, and often church-run, Indian Boarding schools across the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. Indian children were forcibly abducted by government agents, sent to schools hundreds of miles away, and beaten, starved, or otherwise abused when they spoke their Native languages."

During the late 19th century, when most Native Americans, who survived the genocide, were confined to reservations, the federal government engaged in a cultural assimilation campaign by forcing thousands of Native American children to attend boarding schools. In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania was founded by Richard Pratt, who believed that Native people would not succeed unless their traditions, habits, and beliefs were eradicated. Echoing the religious justification expressed in the Doctrine of Discovery, Pratt’s “kill the Indian in him and save the man” philosophy, the Carlisle school became a national model.

Donald L. Fixico framed the genocide of Native Americans as the time "When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’". He summarizes the atrocities by the number of violent wars unleashed against the natives. "From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492."