Forced assimilation and exploitation: How U.S. boarding schools devastated Native American tribes.

BILLINGS, Mont. — The White House said President Joe Biden will apologize on behalf of the U.S. government on Friday for its 150-year campaign to dismantle Native American culture, language and identity by forcing children into abusive Indian boarding schools.

More than 900 children died in publicly funded schools; the last of these closed or were transferred to different institutions decades ago. Their dark legacy continues to be felt in Indigenous communities, where survivors struggle with generational trauma from the torture, sexual abuse and hatred they endured.

Biden is expected to formally acknowledge the federal government’s role and apologize for it during his rally at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.

Here’s a closer look at the federal boarding school system:

150 years of forced assimilation

In 1819, under the administration of 5th U.S. President James Monroe, Congress created the framework for a nationwide boarding school system for Native Americans through legislation known as the Indian Civilization Act. Allegedly, it aimed to stop the “final extinction of the Native American tribes” and “to introduce to them the habits and arts of civilization.”

Central to this effort was the dissolution of Native families and the severing of intergenerational ties that kept their culture alive despite being forced onto reservations.

For the next 150 years, government and religious institutions supported by taxpayer money operated at least 417 schools in 37 states. Staff in schools worked to deprive Indigenous children of their traditions and heritage. Teachers and administrators cut their hair, forbade them from speaking their own language, and forced them to do hard labor.

By the 1920s, most Native school-aged children (about 60,000 children at one point) attended boarding schools run by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

The states with the highest density of schools were those with the largest Native populations: Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. But schools were located in every region of the United States, and students, some as young as 4, were often sent to schools far from home.

The last of the schools opened in 1969, the year the Senate report declared the residential school system a national tragedy. They were found to be grossly underfunded, academically deficient, and with a “significant emphasis” on discipline and punishment.

The policy of forced assimilation was finally and officially rejected with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But despite this policy change, the government never fully examined the residential school system until the Biden administration.

Survivors describe abuse

A nationwide reexamination of the system was launched in 2021 by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo and the nation’s first Native American Cabinet secretary.

He and other Interior officials held listening sessions on and off reservations across the U.S. for two years to allow school survivors and their relatives to tell their stories.

Former students described the harmful and often degrading treatment they suffered from teachers and administrators during their time away from their families. Their descendants spoke of traumas passed down through generations and manifested in broken relationships, substance abuse and other social problems that plague reservations today.

Haaland’s grandparents were among them; They were taken from their community when they were 8 years old and forced to live in a Catholic boarding school until they were 13.

“Make no mistake: This was a concerted attempt to eliminate the quote ‘Indian problem,’ to either assimilate or outright exterminate Indigenous peoples,” Haaland said in July when the findings of the agency’s investigation were released. The agency’s most important recommendation was for the government to formally apologize.

Unmarked graves and repatriations

At least 973 Native American children died in the residential system. These included an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is now the site of the US Army War College. Authorities continue to repatriate; Just last month, the remains of three children who died at the school were exhumed and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

In the research of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, marked and unmarked graves were detected in 65 boarding schools. Causes of death included disease and abuse. More children may have died away from campuses after falling ill at school and being sent home, officials said.

Officials determined that schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending. Religious and private institutions that operated many of the schools received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Native students.

More than 200 of the government-supported schools had religious affiliations. The residential school coalition identified more than 100 additional schools not on the government list, run by churches, with no evidence of federal support.

US Catholic bishops apologized in June for the church’s role in the trauma experienced by children.