Indigenous peoples tell Biden: ‘Sorry is not enough’

President Joe Biden did something that no U.S. president has done. He offered a formal apology for the horrific, racist abuse suffered by Native American and Alaska Native children in so-called American Indian boarding schools. Biden apologized on Oct. 25 outside of Phoenix, Arizona, at the Gila River Indian Community, at a meeting which included tribal leaders, survivors and their families.

The timing and place of this apology raises eyebrows since it comes within two weeks of the Nov. 5 presidential election, and Native Americans make up 5% of the overall population of Arizona, which is a “swing state.” 

Beginning in 1819, thousands of Native American and Alaska Native children were kidnapped from their homes and sent away to schools (in reality, concentration camps), where they were denied the right to their cultures, languages, histories and spiritual beliefs. Their long hair was cut, and many of these children were mentally and physically tortured, scarring them for life. 

At least 973 children died in Indian boarding schools operated or supported by the federal government, often from abuse and disease. (The number is likely much higher.) Their labor was superexploited in the schools and by white adults who adopted them or hired them out. Most large American Indian boarding schools closed in the 1980s and 1990s following years of activism, the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

Many of these schools were maintained by the Catholic Church, other Christian denominations and the Mormon Church. 

This abominable treatment was an instrumental part of a centuries-long genocidal campaign waged against Indigenous peoples that began when the butcher Christopher Columbus seized Caribbean islands in 1492, claiming them for the Spanish monarchy.

While many who attended the Oct. 25 meeting were heartened to hear Biden’s apology, others said that the apology wasn’t nearly enough to reverse the long-lasting physical and psychological harm done to those forced to attend the schools and to the generations that followed. 

Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, a 79-year-old member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, who suffered severe mistreatment at a school in South Dakota that left her with a lifelong, painful limp, said, “Sorry is not enough. Nothing is enough when you damage a human being. A whole generation of people and our future was destroyed for us.” She and others are asking what comes next after the apology. (Associated Press, Oct. 25) 

Indigenous activists and allies protest in Boston.

United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the main organizer of the annual National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, stated on its Facebook page in anticipation of the president’s Oct. 25 announcement: “Biden to issue apology, without reparations, for U.S. Indian boarding schools. Nothing pledged to help Native children and families now dealing with intergenerational trauma, disproportionate number of children in care and all the other effects of genocidal U.S. anti-family policies.”

UAINE continued: “No increased support for Indigenous language revitalization. Not to mention the necessity of landback. Nor the fact that this is being done for votes by an administration actively committing genocide. And free Leonard Peltier!”

Any formal apology by a U.S. president to an oppressed people, such as one President Bill Clinton made in 1997 to African Americans regarding slavery and Biden made recently to Indigenous peoples, is certainly a concession. But these apologies for state-sanctioned atrocities are toothless, because their white supremacist legacies remain intact. 

Workers World is in total solidarity with UAINE and other Indigenous peoples in demanding that reparations be put in place to make any kind of apology real for those who are still fighting for their right to basic human rights, sovereignty and self-determination. 

Otherwise, these apologies amount to nothing but grandstanding.