Biden to apologize for abusive Native American boarding schools

US President Joe Biden was set on Thursday to deliver a historic apology for one of the country's "darkest chapters": the abduction of Native American children from their families and placement in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their culture.

From the early 1800s until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to forcibly assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including conversion to Christianity.

A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with the deaths of nearly a thousand children.

"The Federal Indian Boarding School Era is one of the darkest chapters of American history," Biden wrote on X Thursday, ahead of the apology he plans to deliver at the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona.

"Today, I'm in Arizona to issue a long overdue presidential apology for this era," he added. "We must remember our full history, even when it's painful. That's what great nations do. And we are a great nation."

The White House will stream Biden's address live at 1730 GMT.

Biden will be joined by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary.

- Rare presidential apology -

Under Biden's administration, there has been a significant investment in Native American communities, with executive actions expanding Tribal autonomy and designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites.

In all, there were more than 400 schools, often church run, across 37 states or then-territories.

Native children were forcibly taken under a policy of cultural genocide to "civilize" them, a brutal agenda summed up in the phrase "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."

Emerson Gorman, a Navajo Nation elder and healer, told AFP in a 2020 interview that he was taken from his family at just five years old.

At the boarding school, boys were forced to cut their long braids, forbidden to speak their language, told their religion was "evil," and pressured to convert to Catholicism.

Official apologies for the nation's past sins are rare.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation to compensate over 100,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II.

President Bill Clinton in 1997 formally apologized for the infamous mid-20th-century medical experiment in which hundreds of Black men were intentionally left untreated for syphilis.

And in 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, although he stopped short of a formal apology.

The US House of Representatives apologized for 246 years of African American slavery and the oppressive Jim Crow laws that followed in 2008, with the Senate passing a similar resolution the next year.

But the Congressional apologies did not offer compensation to the descendants of slaves.