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The President of the United States, Joe Biden, has apologized on Friday for the treatment of the indigenous population in the United States.
One of the ‘most terrible chapters’ in the country’s history, he says.
“I have the serious responsibility of being the first president to apologize to the indigenous people,” said Biden, according to the White House’s spokeswoman.
From the early 1800s until the 1970s, children from the indigenous population were taken from their families and put into boarding schools to wipe out their culture.
Instead, they had to assimilate and learn to live like the white population, which consisted of immigrants from Europe.
Among other things, they had to convert to Christianity. The schools, located in 37 of the US states, were often run by churches.
Recently, a report from the United States government documented that physical, psychological and sexual violence was widespread in the boarding schools where the children were placed.
During the approximately 150 years that the boarding school system existed, almost a thousand children died in the hundreds of state boarding schools around the country.
“I formally apologize, as the president of the United States, for what we did”, says Biden on Friday.
He adds that he is aware that ‘no apology can make it right’.
“The pain it has caused will always be a blemish on our history”, emphasizes Biden.
It is rare for an American president to issue an official apology for the country’s historic missteps.
It happened in 1988, when President Ronald Reagan decided to provide compensation to over 100,000 Americans of Japanese background who were interned in camps during World War II.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized for a medical experiment in which the United States in the mid-20th century deliberately withheld treatment for black men who were infected with syphilis.
And in 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima in Japan, where the US dropped an atomic bomb in 1945. But he didn’t give an actual apology for that attack.
President Biden spoke Friday at a school in the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix, Arizona.
With him was his Minister of the Interior, Deb Haaland, who is the first minister with roots in America’s original Indian population.
Taking a more defiant tone, she said in her speech that federal authorities ‘could not wipe out our language, our traditions and our way of life.’
“Despite everything that happened, we’re still here,” said Haaland.
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Source: politiken.dk
