BARTOW COUNTY, Ga. — On Friday, President Joe Biden traveled to Arizona to address members of the Gila River Indian community and issue an apology for what federal officials call historic wrongs.
White House officials said Thursday that in addition to highlighting federal efforts during his presidency to help Tribal Nations in the United States advance their sovereignty, the president planned to apologize to Native communities on behalf of the federal government and the American people.
The president will be apologizing for a more than century-long program involving federally operated boarding schools, including two in the state of Georgia, where the government funded an effort to assimilate generations of Native children by forcibly removing them from their homes, families and communities and putting them in schools far away to assimilate them into white society, according to the White House.
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“The federally-run Indian boarding school system was designed to assimilate Native Americans by destroying Native culture, language, and identity through harsh militaristic and assimilationist methods,” the White House said Thursday.
According to the White House announcement, Biden plans to apologize for “the harms of the past,” which follows an investigation of the federal boarding schools initiated by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, which began in 2021.
“I’m doing something I should have done a long time ago: To make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Biden said Thursday as he left the White House for Arizona, according to reporting by the AP.
The report from the Dept. of the Interior found that over the course of 150 years, children taken from their homes to these boarding schools to integrate them forcibly into American society were emotionally, physically and sexually abused at hundreds of these schools across the United States. The investigation found that at least 973 children at the schools died during that period.
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The two schools in Georgia were in areas northwest of the City of Atlanta, with the High Tower Mission School, also called the Etowah Mission School, located across the river from the Etowah Mounds in Bartow County, and another closer to the Tennessee border in Spring Place.
The Bartow County location’s proximity to the Etowah Mounds is noteworthy due to the significance of the historic site.
The Georgia State Park System reports that the mounds are the most intact Mississippian cultural site in the southeast United States. It’s found northwest of Atlanta above the Etowah River.
Both schools operated in the early 1800s and had at least a dozen students each, according to the federal investigation and related historical documents.
The report from the Interior Department uncovered 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools involved in the boarding program, according to analysis by the Associated Press.
“In making this apology, the President acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated,” the White House said in a statement.
To do so, the president is expected to visit the Gila River Indian Community, located south of Phoenix, Ariz., making good on a promise delivered in 2022 to have the president visit a Native American tribe as part of a national healing process for the events of the past.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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