President Joe Biden visited Arizona on Friday to apologize to Native Americans for placing their children into boarding schools, where the White House claimed they were harmed and deprived of their unique identities.
Biden left the White House Thursday, saying he was traveling to Arizona “to do something that should have been done a long time ago.”
He indicated that he will offer “a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”
The White House dubbed his visit to the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix, his first to Indian Country as president, “historic.”
Officials said he will talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s record of delivering for tribal communities, including meeting his pledge to visit the swing state, which is close to Election Day.
“The president also believes that to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past,” the president’s office stated.
“For more than 150 years, the federal government maintained boarding schools, forcefully removing generations of Native children from their homes and sending them to boarding schools that were often far away. Native children at these schools were subjected to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and at least 973 children perished as revealed in the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report,” according to the White House.
“The federally-run Indian boarding school system was designed to assimilate Native Americans by destroying Native culture, language, and identity through harsh militaristic and assimilationist methods,” it states.
