PHOENIX — Across the United States, a network of over 400 federally sanctioned boarding schools sought to "civilize" Native American children by isolating them from their families and erasing their culture.
On Friday, at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, President Biden issued a formal apology for the United States government's involvement in the 150-year-long program. This apology is the first of its kind.
The "Indian boarding schools" gained prominence when the federal government passed the Indian Civilization Act of 1819 in support of the schools' stated goal to “civilize” Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.
Arizona was home to 47 federal Indian boarding schools — not including the private or religious schools in the state that received federal funding.
While at these schools, Native children were given English names, forced to perform manual labor, and faced abhorrent physical abuse.
Nearly 1,000 Native children died in these schools, many of them buried in unmarked graves, a recent investigation by the Department of the Interior discovered. Countless others likely died from illness and infection after they were sent home to their families.
Some of these schools were still in operation as recently as 1969, the report found. Today, survivors can still vividly recall the torture and hatred they experienced.
"They don't know it because it's not taught in our public schools, they have no clue what we went through," Patty Talahongva, who was at the Phoenix Indian School when she was a child, said. "We're taught in school about slavery. We're taught about internment camps. We're taught about, you know, other wrongs that were done to other ethnic groups."
Talahongva, her parents and grandparents all went to the Phoenix Indian School.
“Because they had such a hard time learning English," Talahongva said, "Because they were punished and ridiculed and harmed in so many ways, they literally decided not to teach us, as their kids, the Hopi language because they did not want us to go through that same trauma.”
Talahongva said an apology is a step. But the apology will be delivered at an event on the Gila River Indian Community, many miles from Phoenix Indian School.
“I wish the President would come here to the sacred ground that is now Steele Indian School Park," Talahongva said. "I wish he would be here to make any announcement because that really sends that message to all of the kids who came to this one boarding school that he's apologizing.”
"Federal Indian Boarding School policies have touched every single indigenous person I know," Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in 2023. "Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry the trauma in our hearts."
Following the investigation, Haaland said she was personally “sorry beyond words,” and called for a formal apology from the federal government writ large. At the time, she did not say whether she would press for one from Pres. Biden.
On Thursday, the White House announced that Pres. Biden would be in Arizona to outline his record of investment into relationships with Tribal Nations and advocacy for Tribal sovereignty.
"As part of his commitment to Tribal Communities, President Biden is also righting a historical wrong by issuing a formal apology for the federal government’s role in Indian Boarding Schools," the White House said as part of the announcement.
"In making this apology, the President acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated," White House officials said in a separate statement.
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