For the first time in history, a sitting U.S. president is set to apologize to Indigenous communities for the role the federal government played in the atrocities Indigenous children faced in the federal Native American Boarding School system.<\/p>\n
The apology, which Biden will deliver Friday when he speaks at the Gila River Crossing School on the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix, comes three years after Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched the first-ever investigation into Native American Boarding Schools.<\/p>\n
The final boarding school report<\/a> provided eight recommendations from the Department of Indian Affairs for the federal government that would support a path to healing for tribal communities.<\/p>\n At the top of that list was a call for the United States to acknowledge and apologize for its role in the federal Indian boarding school policies that have harmed — and continue to harm — Indigenous peoples across the country.<\/p>\n “The president is taking that to heart, and he plans on making an apology to Indian Country for the boarding school era,” Haaland said in an Oct. 23 interview with the Arizona Mirror.<\/p>\n Haaland said she has been pinching herself since she got the news that Biden planned on issuing an apology because of the work put in by so many people to shed light on Native American boarding schools and the lasting impacts it has had on Indigenous communities.<\/p>\n “It’s incredibly meaningful,” Haaland said, because, as part of the boarding school initiative, their department organized the Road to Healing tour, where they visited several Indigenous communities to hear stories about boarding schools.<\/p>\n “They were all heart-wrenching,” Haaland said of stories that were shared by victims and their families. “We sat through so many testimonies from survivors and descendants, and I have a deep understanding of what so many people went through and what our community suffered from.”<\/p>\n The Department of the Interior investigated the federal Indian boarding school system<\/a> across the United States, identifying more than 400 schools and over 70 burial sites.<\/p>\n Arizona was home to 47 of those schools<\/a>, which were attended by Indigenous children who were taken away from their families<\/a> and attempted to assimilate them through education — and, often, physical punishment.<\/p>\n