President Joe Biden plans to apologize tomorrow morning for the federal government’s Indian boarding school program, officials with the Department of Interior have confirmed. The president is expected to deliver the apology at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, alongside leaders from tribal nations, survivors of the boarding schools and their families, and contributors to the government’s two-year investigation into the schools.
The apology follows the publication of the Interior Department’s two-volume report Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which was published in May 2022 and July 2024. The report was the first time the United States government acknowledged the harms of the federal boarding school program.
“It’s really hard to describe how much this will mean,” said Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community and assistant secretary for Indian Affairs who helped lead the federal investigation. “All of us have lived with these stories in our families, and they’ve never been acknowledged by the people responsible.”
“Some people want to talk about money, some people want to talk about policy, and that’s really common to do in government,” said Newland. “But what an apology does is it recognizes the humanity of the people directly affected.”
The report called for a federal apology to Indigenous people. “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,” a fact sheet released by the White House stated.
The report tallied nearly 1,000 Native children buried on former federal boarding school grounds — a number that does not take into account boarding schools run by other entities, like religious institutions. Native children faced forced assimilation and violence as part of what Native community leaders have described as a cultural genocide, over 150 years beginning in 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act.
Read our past coverage about Indian boarding schools:
- Washington works to reconcile its history of Indigenous boarding schools
- Native mental health providers seek to heal boarding school scars with informed and appropriate treatment
- Who does the federal boarding schools investigation leave out?
- The true stakes of the Indian Child Welfare Act
- The night the Greyhounds came
- The children at rest in 4-H Park
- Indigenous college faculty and students lead the removal of racist panels in Colorado
- Interior looks into the legacy of Native boarding schools
- The U.S. stole generations of Indigenous children to open the West
- Where are the Indigenous children who never came home?
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABSHC) said they identified at least 89 other boarding schools not run by the federal government. And reporting from High Country News found additional victims not identified by the federal investigation, such as Hastiin Tadidiin (Diné). He was killed while trying to prevent federal agents from taking his children and transporting them to a boarding school.
In addition to the federal investigation, local efforts for truth and accountability are underway. In Washington state, the Truth and Reconciliation Tribal Advisory Committee will investigate the state’s history of Native boarding schools. The state had at least 17 such schools and plans to release a report sometime in 2025.
Survivors of boarding schools, their families and community seeking support face a mental health system riddled with gaps in services and without culturally appropriate treatment. Navajo Nation Council Delegate Carl Slater told High Country News that the federal government must provide resources to survivors, to begin the healing process. “The (federal) report is just a report without action,” he said. When asked what resources the federal government would provide, Assistant Secretary Newland didn’t offer specific details, but said the report is just the first step.
“There are a lot of people whose families were literally torn apart by this, who have lived with the consequences of trauma from their parents and grandparents,” said Newland. “We’ve got to do something about that.”
He expects that the apology is just the beginning of a long healing process.
“Because this policy was carried out over a century and a half, this work is going to need to be sustained,” he said. “We’ve tried to point the way forward and make sure that future versions of ourselves have some direction of what’s required to repair what was broken.”
“What an apology does is it recognizes the humanity of the people directly affected.”
Newland, who previously served as tribal president to the Bay Mills Indian Community, said he has faced questions and feedback within his own community about the Interior Department’s investigation – more than any other issue.
Shortly after it was first announced, Newland attended his tribal nation’s annual powwow. He described dancing in the dance arena when an older man he didn’t know approached him. “He shook my hand and thanked me,” Newland said. In an echo of the stories Newland would later hear as part of the investigation’s listening sessions, the man then told him about his own experiences at boarding school – the same school Newland’s great-grandfather attended.
Newland believes the apology could be a critical moment for the relationship between tribal communities and the federal government.
“A lot of people in Indian Country had cynicism. And that cynicism was well-earned, about the federal government’s interest in doing right by Indian people,” he said. “By acknowledging their humanity, their dignity, and speaking the name of what was done to people who are still living and their relatives, I’m hopeful that it will inspire people that we’re still capable of self-correction in this country.”
Marty Two Bulls Jr. (Oglala Sioux Tribe) created this art piece for the Oyate Health Center’s new hospital in Rapid City, South Dakota. The hospital sits on the site of the Rapid City Boarding School, a federal Indian boarding school that operated from 1896 to 1933. A member of the community affected by that particular boarding school, Two Bulls Jr. used archival and contemporary images of multiple generations in his community, including his grandmother (a boarding school survivor), his mother and his own children. The original mural includes mirrors to reflect the viewer, including them in the tapestry of the story. For this digital representation, Two Bulls Jr. has replaced the mirrors with images of a nearby under-construction boarding school memorial and other current landmarks in the area.
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