LAVEEN VILLAGE, Ariz. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Friday (Oct. 25) formally apologized to Native Americans for the “sin” of a government-run boarding school system that for decades forcibly separated children from their parents, calling it a “blot on American history” in his first presidential visit to Indian Country.
“It’s a sin on our soul,” said Biden, his voice full of anger and emotion. “Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make.”
It was a moment of both contrition and frustration as the president sought to recognize one of the “most horrific chapters” in the national story. Biden spoke of the abuses and deaths of Native children that resulted from the federal government’s policies, noting that “while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing” and that great nations “must know the good, the bad, the truth of who we are.”
“I formally apologize as president of United States of America for what we did,” Biden said. “The Federal Indian boarding school policy — the pain is has caused will only be a significant mark of shame, a blot on our record history. For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books, not taught in our schools.”
Southern Baptists condemned the boarding schools in a resolution adopted at the 2022 SBC Annual Meeting in Anaheim. The resolution urged Southern Baptists to “decry the methods of forced assimilation and conversion, as well as the dehumanization of fellow image bearers.”
“We condemn any federal government’s policy, former or current, to replace ‘the tribal culture for its own’ in an effort to ease their intent ‘to separate tribes from their territories,’” the resolution said, adding:
“We declare the atrocities done against these people in the name of religious ‘conversions’ as reprehensible, betraying the Great Commission (and our efforts to reach all nations with the gospel (Matthew 10:14; Matthew 28:18-20; John 3:8) …
“We stand against forced conversions and distorted missiological practices as contrary to our distinctive beliefs as Baptists in religious liberty and soul-freedom.”
The resolution concludes with a call for the evangelization of Native peoples, “calling them freely to repent of their sins and believe in Jesus for their salvation, even as morally neutral aspects of their culture are preserved and celebrated.”
Oklahoma pastor and SBC Executive Committee member Mike Keahbone, who is Native American, drafted the resolution and has since used it to minister to survivors of the boarding school program, which was not eliminated until 1969.
For decades, federal boarding schools were used to assimilate children into white society, according to the White House. Not everyone saw the apology as sufficient.
“An apology is a nice start, but it is not a true reckoning, nor is it a sufficient remedy for the long history of colonial violence,” said Chase Iron Eyes, director of the Lakota People’s Law Project and Sacred Defense Fund.
At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system over a 150-year period, according to an Interior Department investigation that called for a U.S. government apology.
At least 18,000 children, some as young as 4, were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them.
From The Associated Press. May not be republished. AP writer Graham Lee Brewer in Norman, Oklahoma, contributed to this report.
