President Joe Biden last week apologized for the United States forcibly assimilating Indigenous children through a nationwide boarding school system.
This policy lasted from 1819 through the 1970s. And Friday, during a press conference at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, Biden became the first president to say sorry.
“All told, hundreds and hundreds of federal Indian boarding schools across the country. Tens of thousands of Native children enter the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher,” Biden said. “Lost generations, culture and language, lost trust. It's horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul.”
In the days since, Indigenous people living in Vermont and beyond have been processing this historic — and complicated — moment.
Mia Montoya Hammersley
Mia Montoya Hammersley is an assistant professor of law and director of the environmental justice clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School. They’re also a member of the Piro/Manso/Tiwa Tribe and a Yaqui descendant.
Hammersley says it’s hard to find an Indigenous family that hasn’t been affected by U.S. boarding schools.
Her great-aunts were sent from New Mexico to Phoenix Indian School in Arizona, while her great-uncles boarded trains to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
“I just imagine what that would have been like for them, you know, only having known their own ancestral lands and arriving in a place so different, so much colder, just completely different environment,” Hammersley said about their great-uncles.
Carlisle is known for its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, who spoke the words, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” And from an academic perspective, Hammersley feels it’s important to grapple with the extreme violence of this assimilation policy.
“At the time that this was occurring, tribes were essentially confined to reservations as prisoners of war,” Hammersley said. “And some of the tactics that were used … included withholding of federal army rations of food until children were sent to boarding school.”
On a personal level, Hammersley said they’ve been thinking about what Biden’s apology would have meant to her ancestors.
“I would say it's incredibly meaningful to me, and emotional,” they said. At the same time, though, Hammersley said she is feeling sad about the timing and context of Biden making this speech less than two weeks before the 2024 presidential election, in a swing state where the Native vote influenced the outcome in 2020.
“In my heart of hearts, I would want this type of recognition to happen not because of a political calculus, right?” she said.
Emma Tsosie
The political calculus was on the mind of Dartmouth College student Emma Tsosie when they first learned Biden would be making an apology.
But then Tsosie, who is Diné and a member of the Picuris Pueblo, heard Biden speak — and said she was surprised at how impassioned he sounded. The words “a sin on our soul,” especially, and the way he raised his voice when he repeatedly said, “I apologize.”
“I think that is an appropriate way to describe, maybe, how like, big of a deal it is,” Tsosie said, adding that her great-grandfather was “essentially kidnapped” off the Navajo reservation to be brought to boarding school. “Just how horrible of a thing it was that the United States did for so long.”
At the same time, Tsosie said actions are more powerful than words. Especially, they said, when it comes to the Biden administration sending a record-amount of military aid to Israel during the last year of that country’s invasion of Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.
During those attacks, Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage, according to Israel. Since then, Israel has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, displaced around 90% of the population, cut off humanitarian aid and damaged or destroyed more than half of Gaza’s infrastructure.
“It's just very concerning to me that there would be an apology for one genocide — it almost feels like because it's old enough, it's like, 'OK, now we can talk about it,'” Tsosie said, referring to boarding schools. “But then this genocide that's happening in Palestine against another group of Indigenous people is, for some reason, thought of differently.”
When a protester interrupted Biden’s speech last week to say something similar, the president told security to let the person speak, and also acknowledged that “there’s a lot of innocent people being killed.”
For Tsosie, that was “below the bare minimum, but still something.”
“I was glad that there was an Indigenous voice speaking about that at this event,” they said.
Denise Watso
Denise Watso said she is feeling reenergized to use her own voice following Biden’s apology.
She’s been waiting for this country to apologize ever since Canada did in 2008 for its residential schools, which were modeled on the United States federal Indian boarding school system.
“It’s been long, long overdue,” she said.
Watso is an Abenaki citizen of Odanak First Nation, living in Albany, New York. And she has been an activist for decades, speaking to Indigenous issues as the child of a survivor of Canadian residential schools.
“They stole their voices," Watso said. “You can't imagine being put in an institution, that you would have a voice after being shamed, beat for your language, beat for speaking, beat for laughing, put in a hole and closed in closet for days … So I swore that I would be their voice. I will be my father's voice, my aunt's voice, my ancestors’ voice.”
This past week, Watso said she decided to write down her family’s residential school story, as told to her by her aunt. She shared it with her partner and their two children, who are now high-school- and college-aged.
Watso’s father and his four siblings were sent from Odanak, in Quebec, over 700 miles away to Chapleau, in Ontario.
“To a school called St. Joseph's School. It was run by the Anglican Church,” she said. “They drove them out, and then they dropped them off at train tracks. … It was at night, and they had to walk along the train tracks. They told them, ‘Just follow the train tracks and you'll see the building.’ And they're all crying, of course, right?”
Watso said she tears up when she pictures how small her own children were between the ages of 5 and 9 — the ages of her father and his siblings when they were taken from their families.
And she said the awareness of these “pure evil” schools that Biden’s apology brings is the first step. The next, she added, should be real reparative work, done through tribal consultation, with funding for Indigenous institutions and education to help revitalize Indigenous cultures.
“They stole our children. They stole our languages. It was built on stolen lands,” Watso said. “We lost a lot of people due to high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, because of that loss. So the answer is in the culture, when people come back to their identity of language, culture, you know, dance, song, celebration, sacred ceremonies … So you can bring back families to the full breath of their life.”
Beverly Little Thunder
Huntington resident, Lakota elder and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe citizen Beverly Little Thunder is also eager for action from the Biden administration.
For Little Thunder, whose mother and siblings were sent to federal Indian boarding schools, and who herself briefly went to one, she thinks the U.S. government needs to truly collaborate with Indigenous nations.
“Recognizing the nations as individual entities, and truly collaborating on what the tribes see as a need,” she said.
After issuing the formal apology last week, Biden committed to “working with Indigenous communities across the country to write a new and better chapter of our, in our history, to honor the solemn promise the United States made to tribal nations, to fulfill our federal trust and treaty obligations.”
But with three months left in his presidency to make good on this commitment, Little Thunder said she wishes Biden had done it sooner.
“I think that timing is everything, and I think this timing was, was not well thought out,” she said. “Restitution and action would be demanding that every treaty that the United States had ever signed with any of the nations in this country be brought out, looked at and honored.”
For instance: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which Little Thunder belongs to, recently filed a new lawsuit over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), alleging it violates an 1868 treaty and risks contaminating water.
“There's pipelines in this country that are carrying gas and oil across the country under rivers,” Little Thunder said, adding that the Trump administration gave the green light to the previously-halted DAPL with an executive order. “And all this time, Biden could have put a stop to it. He could have done more.”
The complexity of the moment
Everyone interviewed for this story expressed a complexity of emotions around Biden’s formal apology. Gratitude that it finally happened, frustration over the timing, desire for change that’s more tangible. And — loneliness in digesting this news, since many Americans aren’t aware of their country's violent assimilation policy for Indigenous peoples.
Emma Tsosie, the Dartmouth College student, said it’s a lot to process all at the same time.
“The United States is a very complex empire, so any statements made essentially by this empire are complex in and of themselves, and hard to deal with,” they said. “It’s like — hard to know exactly how to feel.”
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