Biden makes historic apology to Native Americans – DW – 10/26/2024

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, on Friday made a historic apology for the atrocities committed over more than a century with the abduction of thousands of Native American children who were interned by the state in schools where they were subjected to abuse. Had to face and was forced. Forgetting your culture.

“As President of the United States, I formally apologize for what we did,” the president said in a gesture that no sitting American president has said before.

“We should be ashamed,” the Democratic president told a crowd of Indigenous people, including tribal leaders, survivors and their families, gathered at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.

During a speech at the Gila River Indian Community in the village of Laveen, Arizona, Biden acknowledged decades of abuse of children and widespread abuse, calling the government-enforced system that began in 1819 “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.” ” Said it left behind devastation.

fifteen decades of abuse

For 150 years, the United States took indigenous children from their homes and sent them to schools, where they were stripped of their cultures, histories, and religions and beaten for speaking their languages.

From the early 1800s to the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of boarding schools across the country for the forced adaptation of Native children to the culture of European settlers, including conversion to Christianity.

These boarding schools are “sins in our souls,” the president said.

A recent government report revealed cases of psychological, physical and sexual abuse and even the deaths of up to a thousand dead minors.

“Today we are finally moving towards the light”

“I know that no apology can and will fix what was lost during the worst federal boarding school policy ever,” Biden said. But “today we are finally moving toward the light.”

The President was accompanied by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold the secretariat.

Federal officials “failed to destroy our languages, our traditions, our ways of life,” Haaland said. “Despite everything that happened, we’re still here.”

Over more than 150 years, more than 400 schools, often run by the church, were registered in 37 states or territories of the United States.

Under the Biden administration, significant investments have been made in Native American communities to expand people’s autonomy and the designation of monuments to protect ancestral sacred sites.

The apology from the US state comes after formal statements in Canada, where thousands of children died in similar boarding schools, and as more countries recognize abuses against indigenous populations.

JC (AFP, EFE, AP)