An apology often isn’t all that’s necessary, but it’s significant when working toward repair.
In the case of the treatment that Native American children were subjected to for more 150 years, from 1819-1969, as government- and religious-funded schools in more than 400 locations in 37 states stripped away their families, languages, cultures and identities, an apology came from President Joe Biden last week delivered at the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix.
Biden was the first American president to do so. It was the leadership of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American Cabinet Secretary, who helped make that happen. Her grandparents were forced into Indian boarding schools as children.
It was a long time coming.
The statistics and the stories are accumulating, and they are grim. Some 19,000 children, some as young as 4 years old, were forcibly removed from their homes, and 1,000 died while attending the schools. There are still unmarked graves with relatives still searching for their ancestors.
Traumatized children suffered distance from family, mandatory farm work, cropped hair and European dress, physical punishment for using their native language, psychological and sexual abuse. As the president said, “One of the most horrific chapters in American history.”
Last year, History Colorado released an initial history of boarding school events and is continuing its research with state funding for another year.
This also went on at the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School from 1891-1910 not far from Durango, south of Hesperus on the grounds of the former Fort Lewis military encampment that would go on to become a two-year college before relocating instruction to Durango.
The college began a reconciliation process in 2019 as an attempt to own its role in the history of forced assimilation by establishing a Committee on FLC History, hosting listening sessions to open dialogue and develop recommendations and removing campus installations that incorrectly depicted its past.
All Indigenous people, boarding school survivors and their descendants, suffer the trauma of this time. Biden’s words were an important first step toward continued reconciliation and healing. Action must come next.
