GILA RIVER, ARIZONA — Minnesota Indigenous leaders are reacting to President Joe Biden's apology on behalf of the United States for its policies from the 1880s to 1970 that took thousands of Indigenous children away from their families for residential boarding schools, where they experienced forced assimilation and abuse, and some children never returned home.
Biden issued the presidential apology for the Federal Indian Boarding School Era at the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix on Friday, Oct. 25, while speaking on his administration’s efforts to invest in Indian Country during his first presidential visit to a tribal nation.
“Generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn't know with people they'd never met, who spoke a language they had never heard," Biden said in his address. "Native communities silenced, their children's laughter and play were gone. Children would arrive at schools. Their clothes taken off. Their hair — that they were told was sacred — was chopped off. Their names literally erased, replaced by a number or an English name.”
White Earth hosted a ceremony last month for two children, John Parker and Joseph Roy, who, after 134 years, finally came home from St. John’s Industrial School.
“For generations, our people have endured the lasting effects of boarding schools, where children were taken, cultures suppressed, and our way of life nearly erased," wrote White Earth Chairman Michael Fairbanks in a news release. "We are grateful to President Biden for his courage in taking this step, acknowledging this history and beginning the healing process.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan also issued a statement commending the President’s words.
“Every Native person knows someone impacted by Indian boarding schools,” Flanagan said. "Words will never be able to undo this harm but this President is helping us move towards healing.”
“For much of this country, boarding schools are places where affluent families send their children for an exclusive education. For Indigenous peoples, they served as places of trauma and terror for more than 100 years,” said Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior.
Haaland is the country’s first Indigenous cabinet member as a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and spoke on her department’s painful history with Indigenous people.
“This is the first time in history that a United States Cabinet secretary has shared the traumas of our past, and I acknowledge that this trauma was perpetrated by the agency that I now lead,” she said.
Haaland went on a reservation listening tour as part of a federal investigation into the government’s boarding school programs. She heard from tribal elders and descendants of the people who attended these schools, who reported physical and emotional abuse as well as death, with hundreds of children buried in unmarked graves.
"I have a solid responsibility to be the first president to formally apologize to the Native peoples," Biden said. "This is long overdue, there is no excuse this apology took 50 years to make. ... This policy will forever be a mark of shame, a blot on American history. For too long this happened with virtually no public attention."