Biden apologizes to Native Americans for boarding schools

President joe biden He officially apologized to Native Americans Friday afternoon in Arizona for child abuse and other acts on behalf of the federal government in one of his final speeches as commander in chief.

the president spoke to a crowd in the Gila River Indian Community about the programs of previous centuries that removed many Indian children from their homes and placed them in boarding schools where hundreds were murdered.

Biden’s apology, the first by a sitting president on behalf of the U.S. government, was directed to tribal members across the country.

“After 150 years, the US government finally stopped the program. But the federal government has never formally apologized for what happened, until today. I formally apologize, as President of the United States of America, for what we did. “I formally apologize,” Biden said. “That should have been done a long time ago.” Continuous:

One of the most horrible chapters in American history. We should be ashamed! The vast majority of Americans don’t know this. Generations of native children stolen, taken to places they didn’t know, with people they had never met, who spoke a language they had never heard. Silenced native communities. The laughter and games of his children had disappeared. Children who arrived at schools, without clothes, with hair that they were told was sacred, cut. Their names were literally erased, replaced with a number or an English name.

“For too long, all of this happened virtually without public attention, without being written in our history books,” Biden also said. “It’s not taught in our schools.”

Like CBS News reported of boarding schools:

From 1819 until the 1970s, the federal government and religious institutions established boarding schools across the country to assimilate Alaska Native, American Indian, and Hawaiian children into white American culture by forcibly removing them from their families, communities, and belief systems.

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Many children who attended these boarding schools suffered emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and hundreds of them died. And those who returned home were wounded in body and spirit, Biden said. Even after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, atrocities continued.

Watch it above via CNN.

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