Native Americans across Indian Country shared mixed emotions this week after President Biden apologized for the U.S. government’s role it played in running Native boarding schools across the country.
During the 150-year practice, at more than 400 schools where the U.S. partnered with various religious institutions, Indigenous children were separated from their families and stripped of their language and customs in an effort to assimilate into white culture. There were also documented cases of abuse and death.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is Laguna Pueblo and has been instrumental in bringing these issues to a wider audience through her Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, applauded Biden’s move.
“I’m so grateful to [Biden] for acknowledging this terrible era of our nation’s past,” Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools, posted on X.
Federal Indian boarding schools have impacted every Indigenous person I know. These were places where children – including my grandparents – were traumatized. I’m so grateful to @POTUS for acknowledging this terrible era of our nation’s past. https://t.co/E4uFBcN6aR
— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) October 24, 2024
“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” she told the Associated Press.
At the Gila Crossing Community School near Phoenix, Biden celebrated Haaland’s historic role and apologized today for America’s “sin.”
“It’s an honor, a genuine honor … to right a wrong, to chart a new path,” he said. “I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologize. It’s long overdue.”
However, Indigenous leaders and citizens across the country stressed that this is only the first step.
“This is one of the most historic days in the history of Indian country, and an apology of this size must be followed by real action,” Nick Tilsen, who is Oglala Lakota and president and CEO of Indigenous rights organization NDN Collective, told Yahoo News.
Tilsen believes that there are specific, actionable steps that need to accompany any apology. For him, that means passing the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission bill in Congress, rescinding medals of honor for those who participated in the Battle of Wounded Knee, releasing “longest living Indigenous political prisoner in American history Leonard Peltier, who is also a boarding school survivor” and “unprecedented investment in Indigenous languages and education.”
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chuck Hoskin celebrated the move, calling out Haaland’s role in particular, and echoed the sentiment of following any apology with action.
“The [Department of the Interior’s] recommendations, especially in the preservation of Native languages and the repatriation of ancestors and cultural items, can be a path toward true healing,” Hoskin said in a statement.
While many Indigenous leaders are calling for action, Tilsen stressed that this is also a time to hold boarding school survivors and their families close.
“At this moment in history, we have to remember many of the survivors of the boarding schools are still alive,” he said. “It’s in every household and it’s in every community. And it’s directly tied to the struggles that our people have today.”
Dylan Rose Goodwill, who is Diné (Navajo), Hunkpapa Lakota and Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, was visiting Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, Calif., on Thursday when she heard the news about Biden’s forthcoming apology. It’s a place that is part of her family history, as her grandmother (or másáni) was sent there when it served as a federally-run Native boarding school.
She told Yahoo News that hearing the news there was “complicated.”
As the senior assistant director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Southern California, Goodwill was visiting the school as a college recruiter.
“I’ve always had these kind of mixed feelings because it’s been weird to be the admission counselor for the schools that my own grandparents attended,” she said.
“It was already a tough morning to go and then to receive the news on site was really a mixture of feelings because I felt anger mostly, where it was like disbelief that this was happening, excitement that at least it was happening, but also feeling like this isn’t enough,” Goodwill added.
Sitting where her grandmother sat in the 1930s and ‘40s, Goodwill asked herself, “What is that gonna really hold for her now? She passed in ‘04.”
Biden’s statement comes 16 years after former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s role in the Indigenous residential school system — a topic filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie document in their film Sugarcane, about St. Joseph’s Mission School near the Sugarcane reserve in British Columbia.
NoiseCat, who is a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’wat Nation of Mount Currie and whose grandmother attended the Catholic Church-run residential school and gave birth to his father there, told Yahoo News that this moment was important for a “continent-wide conversation about what happened to Native families and Native children at Native American boarding schools and Indian residential schools.”
Joining Biden and Haaland for the event on the Gila River Indian Reservation along with Kassie, NoiseCat continued, “The fact that the president has chosen to formally apologize to survivors and their families is a real testament to the significance of this story, which needs to be understood as a foundational story to North America.”
However, Kassie echoed that actionable steps must follow sentiment.
“As momentous and important as this day is, it’s important that it’s followed up with action,” she told Yahoo. “It’s important that the records of what happened at these institutions that are held by the U.S. government and the Catholic Church are opened to Indigenous communities who are looking for answers. And it’s important that those communities also have the opportunity to hold to account those institutions and individuals who abused them.”
For Tilsen, it’s also a time to “center the survivors.”
“As we sort of politically dissect this moment,” he said, “I also want to recognize the pain that is being resurfaced, and that our people deserve the right to have pain and they deserve the right to have rage in this moment while we lean towards moving forward in action.”
NoiseCat, who has a deeply personal connection to the residential school history, said, “I’m probably going to call my dad today after the apology and just check in with him.”
Cover thumbnail photo via Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
