In boarding schools in the USA, indigenous children were converted to Christianity and the culture of European settlers. Children were subjected to physical, psychological and sexual violence.
President of the United States Joe Biden issued a formal apology on Friday for the US practice of locking up indigenous children in boarding schools.
From the early 1800s to the 1970s, there were hundreds of boarding schools in the United States where indigenous children were abducted and forcibly converted to Christianity and the culture of European settlers. Activists belonging to indigenous peoples call the activities of boarding schools cultural genocide.
A recent investigation by the country’s administration revealed that children were subjected to physical, psychological and sexual violence in boarding schools. Almost a thousand children also died in them.
Biden called the events one of the “most horrific periods in American history” and “a sin in our souls.”
– As the President of the United States, I formally apologize for what we did, Biden said in his speech at the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona.
During his presidency, Biden has tried to improve the status of indigenous peoples. For example, he has expanded indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and protected indigenous sacred sites through presidential orders.
The US administration has rarely apologized for its actions.
In 1988 the president Ronald Reagan signed into law compensation for more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.
In 1997, the president Bill Clinton officially apologized for a mid-20th century human experiment in which hundreds of black men infected with syphilis were deliberately left without medical treatment.
President About Barack Obama in turn became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima in 2016. However, he did not issue an official apology for dropping the atomic bomb on the city in 1945.
In addition, in 2008, the US House of Representatives issued an apology for the 246 years of black slavery and the discriminatory Jim Crow legislation. The Senate voted in favor of a similar declaration the following year.
Congressional apologies, however, did not include compensation for descendants of slaves.
Source: AP