PHOENIX: US President Joe Biden delivered a historic apology Friday (Oct 25) for one of many nation’s “most horrific chapters”: abducting Native American kids from their households and inserting them in authorities boarding faculties to erase their tradition.
From the early 1800s till the Nineteen Seventies, the USA ran a whole lot of Indian boarding faculties throughout the nation to forcibly assimilate Native kids into European settler tradition, together with conversion to Christianity.
A current authorities report revealed harrowing cases of bodily, psychological, and sexual abuse, together with the deaths of practically a thousand kids.
“I formally apologize, as president of the USA of America, for what we did,” he mentioned in an impassioned speech on the Gila River Indian Neighborhood in Laveen Village, Arizona that was streamed reside by the White Home.
He referred to as the roughly 150 years the college system existed one of many “most horrific chapters in American historical past” and a “sin on our soul”.
“I do know no apology can or will make up for what was misplaced in the course of the darkness of the federal boarding college coverage,” he continued. “In the present day, we’re lastly shifting ahead into the sunshine”.