President Biden leaves the stage after speaking at the Gila River Crossing School in the Gila River Indian Community, in Laveen Village, near Phoenix, Arizona, on Oct. 25, 2024.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The history is personal for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the United States’ first-ever Native American Cabinet secretary. Her maternal grandparents were 8 years old when they were taken from their communities and placed in a Catholic boarding school until they were 13, and her great-grandfather was also forced into an Indian boarding school.
“Tens of thousands of Indigenous children as young as 4 years old were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government and religious institutions,” Haaland said Friday in Arizona. “These federal Indian boarding schools have impacted every Indigenous person I know. Some are survivors, some are descendants. But we all carry the trauma that these policies and these places inflicted. This is the first time in history that a United States Cabinet secretary has shared the traumas of our past, and I acknowledge that this trauma was perpetrated by the agency that I now lead.”Â
Haaland conducted the first-ever federal investigation into the federal Indian boarding school era. The probe revealed that more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children’s deaths occurred at 19 of the federal Indian boarding schools, and identified 53 marked and unmarked burial sites at school sites nationwide.Â
President Biden is greeted by members of a Native American community upon arrival at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona, on Oct. 24, 2024.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The Interior Department’s report found that when children failed to meet standards or broke rules, they were subjected to corporal punishment, including “solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing.” Oftentimes, older children were forced to inflict punishment on their younger classmates.
The federal government often contracted with Presbyterian, Catholic and Episcopalian religious institutions to run the schools, in an effort to assimilate Native children into White American culture.Â
“But as we stand here together, my friends and relatives, we know that the federal government failed,” Haaland said, to applause. “It failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways, it failed to destroy us, because we persevered.”Â
Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Arizona, Haaland’s voice broke.Â
“For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books,” Haaland said Thursday. “But now, our administration’s work will ensure that no one will ever forget.”Â
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Kathryn Watson
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Publish date : 2024-10-25 07:46:00
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