There is a dark chapter in American history that many do not know. US President Joe Biden is now addressing this aggressively – and asking for forgiveness.
US President Joe Biden has apologized on behalf of the American government for the injustice that indigenous children once suffered in state boarding schools. The US government has stolen generations of indigenous children from their families for over 150 years, Biden said during a visit to an indigenous community near the city of Phoenix in the state of Arizona.
In boarding schools they were beaten and abused, had their hair cut off, had their names renamed and were forbidden to speak their own language, Biden said. Some were given up for adoption, others died. And those who returned home brought trauma and shame with them.
“As President of the United States of America, I apologize formally for what we have done,” Biden said. It is one of the darkest chapters in US history, and one that many Americans know nothing about. After 150 years, the US government ended the boarding school program in the 1970s, but never apologized for what happened. This is long overdue.
Biden: Shameful for the USA
“For those who lived through that time, it was too painful to talk about. It was too shameful for our nation to admit it,” Biden said. “But just because history is silent doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Residential schools run by the U.S. government housed indigenous children who had been taken from their families. They should be re-educated and forget their own culture. Many children never returned home. Residential schools for indigenous people are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of children, the Interior Ministry found in a report published in 2022.
“Extensive physical, sexual and emotional abuse, disease, malnutrition, overcrowding and lack of medical care” in the boarding schools were well documented, it said.
Biden’s appearance in Arizona shortly before the presidential election
Biden’s message to indigenous people and the symbolic visit to Arizona come less than two weeks before the presidential election, in which his deputy Kamala Harris will face Republican former President Donald Trump. Arizona is one of the so-called swing states, i.e. the most politically contested states that will be decisive in the election.
