Biden gestures after speaking at the Gila River Crossing School in the Gila River Indian Community, in Laveen Village, near Phoenix. – AFP
President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned, historic apology on Friday for one of the United States’s “most horrific chapters”: ripping Native American children from their families and putting them in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their culture. From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity. A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with the estimated deaths of nearly 1,000 children – with the true figure thought to be considerably higher. “I formally apologise, as president of the United States, for what we did,” he said in a speech that alternated between fiery and deeply emotional, addressing the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona. He added the roughly 150 years the school system existed were one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and a “sin on our soul”. Several hundred people attended, many of them in traditional tribal dress. They cheered as Biden apologised for the generational trauma faced by the Native American community due to the boarding schools across the country. Biden faced a brief interruption when a pro-Palestinian protester shouted: “How can you apologise for a genocide while committing a genocide in Palestine?” The president replied: “There is a lot of innocent people being killed and it has to stop.” US support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon after the events of October 7, 2023 has led to months of demonstrations across the United States. Rights advocates have demanded an arms embargo against Israel as tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the region, and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have grappled with hunger and disease. Israel and Washington deny genocide allegations brought against Israel at the World Court in relation to Gaza, and Washington has maintained its support for its ally. Biden was joined in the Laveen Village event by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, who struck a defiant tone as she recalled her own maternal grandparents “were stolen from their communities and forced to live in a Catholic school”. Federal authorities “failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways”, she continued. “In spite of everything that has happened, we are still here!” The Biden administration has invested significantly in Native American communities, with executive actions expanding tribal autonomy, directing agencies to prioritise gender-based violence, designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites, and more. The apology follows formal declarations in Canada, where thousands of children died at similar boarding schools, and other countries around the world where historic abuses of Indigenous populations are increasingly being recognised. In all, there were more than 400 schools, often church-run, across 37 states or then-territories. Native children were forcibly taken under a policy of what activists call cultural genocide to “civilise” them, a brutal agenda summed up in the phrase “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”. Emerson Gorman, a Navajo Nation elder, told AFP in a 2020 interview that he was taken from his family at just five years old. At the boarding school, boys were forced to cut their long braids, forbidden to speak their language, told their religion was “evil”, and pressured to convert to Catholicism. Official apologies for the nation’s past wrongdoings are rare. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation to compensate more than 100,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. President Bill Clinton in 1997 formally apologised for the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of the mid-20th century where hundreds of black men were left untreated for syphilis to learn how the disease progresses. In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, where the United States dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945, although he stopped short of a formal apology. And in 2008, the US House of Representatives apologised for 246 years of African American slavery and the racist Jim Crow laws that followed. The Senate passed a similar resolution the next year. However, the congressional apologies did not include reparations to the descendants of slaves. – AFP/Reuters
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