In Arizona speech, Joe Biden will apologize for US abuses in Native boarding schools
President Joe Biden is expected to formally apologize Friday for the abuses committed against Native boarding school students over the past century, a historic step long sought by former students and their families, during a visit to the Gila River Indian Community.
Under Biden and his Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, the federal government completed a three-year study that investigated the failed federal policy of sending Native children as young as age 4 to faraway boarding schools, a policy that led to generations of trauma.
Tribal communities have grappled with the effects of thousands of kids coming home without language, cultural ties or parenting skills since they had no parental role models. Children exposed to chronic stresses became dysfunctional adults whose attempts at parenting created a new generation with similar issues. The findings were presented in reports released in May 2022 and July 2024.
Former students and their families said an important first step in healing from the oftentimes traumatic experiences and the intergenerational consequences was for the federal government to formally apologize for its actions. Biden is expected to make that apology during a planned speech at the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix, where he will also lay out his record of engagement with Indian Country during his term in office.
Haaland, the first-ever Native American to serve in the Cabinet, said she was proud and humbled to realize the completion of the reports, which also laid out other steps in supporting tribes and tribal members to heal from the intergenerational effects of the traumatic era. For example, "The federal boarding school initiative has led to increased funding for language programs," she said. And, Haaland said as a result of the report, "The president is apologizing to Indian Country for the government's shameful treatment in the schools."
She added that in the past, these apologies have been few and far between, so Biden's visit holds special significance to Indian Country.
Though the boarding school era is one of Indian Country's most traumatic and painful periods, Haaland said, "We will find healing."
Legacy of grief: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland hears from Indian boarding school survivors in Arizona
Report uncovers 'troubled legacy'
The boarding school initiative was launched in 2021 to investigate and document the "troubled legacy" of how the 417 federal schools and another 1,025 religious and privately operated schools worked to assimilate Indian children by removing them from their homes to sometimes remote military-style schools where they were systemically deprived of language, culture and family life.
More than 18,000 children were shipped off to schools as far as 2,000 miles from their homelands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those removals were accomplished through many means, including sending in soldiers to communities to forcibly take children.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which partnered with the Interior Department to conduct the investigation, said that number grew to more than 60,000 in the 1920s.
Nearly 900 known deaths occurred in the 417 federal-run institutions, along with uncounted cases of trauma, abuse, neglect, poor nutrition and despair.
Parents who refused to send their kids faced jail time, including 19 Hopi men who were imprisoned at Alcatraz for the crime of not letting go of their children.
At the height of the boarding school era, Arizona had 59 schools. Currently, 34 of them are still open, with half run by the Bureau of Indian Education and the rest by tribes or religious institutions. Boarding schools are still operated to serve students from remote communities, but kids go home on weekends and holidays.
During the 12-stop "Road to Healing" tour, Haaland and Undersecretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland heard from many survivors of boarding schools in Arizona and California. During the tour's stop in Gila River in January 2023, tribal members and their families told often tearful stories of their experiences. One family member, April Hiosik Ignacio, said her orphaned great-grandfather Jose Ignacio, a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, was sent all the way to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
Ignacio sent his kids to the Tucson Indian School, where they endured brutal punishments for speaking their language.
"My grandmother's sister got her tongue split for speaking the O'odham language," Ignacio said at the event. "She had to sit at her desk for hours with blood-soaked saliva overflowing across her hands and her dress."
Some of the report's recommendations include culturally based, community-driven healing efforts in Indian Country, urban Indian communities, and the Native Hawaiian community; educational reforms in tribal schools; family reunification and strengthening to counter the corrosive effects of generations of children who never learned how to be parents; and violence reduction in tribal communities.
Listening to stories: 'I can take this': Former boarding school students tell Haaland about abuse, mistreatment
Tribal consultation, infrastructure support, White House tribal liaison
The boarding school initiative, although of vital importance to Indigenous people across the nation, is one of several moves by the Biden administration to reform and strengthen tribes and their relationship with the federal government.
One of the first moves was reviving the White House Council on Native American Affairs. The interagency council that includes leaders from across the federal government was established by President Barack Obama in 2013 after tribal leaders asked for an all-of-government office but had not met regularly since 2016. Biden also brought Haaland on as interior secretary and made several other key nominations of Indigenous people for key offices such as Lynn Malerba, lifetime chief of the Mohegan Tribe, as the first Native U.S. treasurer.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act have provided billions of dollars for tribal infrastructure projects ranging from rehabilitating habitat for the Apache trout in Arizona, the first trout species that has recovered enough to be removed from endangered status, to funding to begin building enhanced internet and telecommunications service in the Havasupai's home in Havasu Canyon near the Grand Canyon.
Over the past three and a half years, the Biden administration has also provided funding for Indian water rights settlements, including a historic $5 billion settlement in July that included the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.
Across the nation, the administration has allocated $2.8 billion in additional mandatory funding to the Indian Water Rights Settlement Completion Fund, as well as $226 million in discretionary funding to meet existing settlement obligations.
The Gila River Indian Community recently received $107 million for water conservation measures, which will save the tribe about 73,000 acre-feet of water by replacing and upgrading Gila River Farms' irrigation systems, lining 7 1/2 miles of earthen canals in the Blackwater area with concrete, constructing a regulating reservoir to capture spillage from the Santan Canal when too much water is accidentally ordered or delivered into the system.
Haaland said one of Biden's first priorities was enhancing tribal consultation processes. He ordered agencies to establish uniform minimum standards on how to initiate and maintain two-way, nation-to-nation discussions and dialogue regarding federal policies that impact tribal governments.
He also instituted policies to streamline funding mechanisms for tribal programs and work to meet trust obligations that have been unfulfilled. That included increasing access to capital through a variety of laws and policies and addressing barriers to obtaining loans and grants.
And the administration has prioritized tribal co-stewardship and incorporating Indigenous knowledge into federal research, policy, and decision-making.
Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, said the Invest in America agenda has resulted in $45 billion in initiatives and programs. "That's 15 years of BIA funding in just three years," she said.
"I'm over the moon with all that President Biden has done for tribal communities."
Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter @debkrol.
Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.