PHOENIX: US President Joe Biden delivered a historic apology Friday (Oct 25) for one of the country’s “most horrific chapters”: abducting Native American children from their families and placing them in government boarding schools to erase their culture.
From the early 1800s until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to forcibly assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including conversion to Christianity.
A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with the deaths of nearly a thousand children.
“I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did,” he said in an impassioned speech at the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona that was streamed live by the White House.
He called the roughly 150 years the school system existed one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and a “sin on our soul”.
“I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” he continued. “Today, we’re finally moving forward into the light”.
