“A sin that stains our soul”: US President Joe Biden presented a rare and historic apology on Friday for the atrocities committed over more than a century in boarding schools where tens of thousands of indigenous children, torn from their families by the State, were placed and mistreated with the aim of forced assimilation.
I formally apologize, as President of the United States, for what we have done, said Joe Biden, banging his fist on his lectern after observing a moment of silence to honor those lost and the generations who live with this trauma.
In the indigenous community of Gila River, Arizona, he recalled the atrocities committed during one of the most horrific chapters in U.S. history, one that most Americans don’t even know about.
For more than 150 years, he acknowledged, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were taken by the state to residential schools where they were physically, psychologically and sexually abused.
These residential schools existed between the early 19th century and the 1970s. According to a government report, at least 973 children died in these facilities.
Generations, cultures, languages and the trust of Indigenous people were lost and, since then, trauma and shame have been passed down from generation to generation, Joe Biden added in his speech.
After shaky first sentences, Joe Biden seemed to gain confidence throughout his speech, forcefully deploring the acts committed by the American state.
The US government had never apologized until now, he stressed.
This rare presidential apology is so historic that I’m not sure I can adequately express its impact, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous person to hold such a position in the United States, said Thursday. . They mean so much more than words could express.
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Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is the first Indigenous person to hold such a position in U.S. history.
Photo : AFP / ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS
It was under his leadership that a major investigation was launched in 2021, which resulted in a detailed report. She also led a tour, called Path to Healing, in 12 indigenous communities to give victims the opportunity to present their testimony.
For more than a century, tens of thousands of Native children, as young as four years old, were taken from their families and communities and forcibly placed in boarding schools run by the U.S. government and by religious institutions.
A quote from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland
This includes my own family, she continued, and for decades this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books, she added.
America’s Catholic bishops this year formally acknowledged the Church’s role in the trauma inflicted on Indigenous people and apologized.
In the middle of the presidential campaign
The Joe Biden administration has implemented a series of measures to support indigenous nations and improve relations with the federal state.
Several ancestral places have been designated national monuments, decrees have been promulgated to impose regular and diligent consultation with indigenous governments by federal agencies and several billion dollars have been invested to build infrastructure in indigenous communities.
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The American government has never apologized until now, Joe Biden stressed.
Photo : AFP / ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS
Joe Biden’s trip also comes in the middle of the presidential campaign, led by his vice-president Kamala Harris against Republican Donald Trump, in an extremely close race.
In 2020, Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona, a key state which could, with other states, swing the outcome of the election in November and which is one of those with the largest indigenous population in the United States. United.
These apologies from Joe Biden come seven years after those of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In 2008, Stephen Harper, then Prime Minister, presented Canada’s official apology to those interned in residential schools for Indigenous people.
The wound was rekindled in 2021 with the discovery of more than a thousand anonymous graves on the sites of former Catholic residential schools for Indigenous people.
During a visit to Canada in the summer of 2022, Pope Francis asked for forgiveness “for the evil committed by many Christians against indigenous peoples.”
