Gov. Kathy Hochul will make what is
believed to be the first trip by a sitting New York governor to Seneca
Nation Territory next week, when she will apologize to the Seneca people
and thousands of former Indigenous students and descendants for what
she said was New York’s role in separating them from their families and
forcing them to assimilate at the Thomas Indian School in Western New
York’s Cattaraugus Territory.
Hochul’s Tuesday visit includes meetings with survivors of atrocities
committed at the residential boarding school, which the state owned and
operated from 1875 to 1957, she and Seneca President J. Conrad Seneca
announced Friday morning.
“The atrocities that our children suffered at the Thomas Indian
School have remained hidden in the shadows for far too long,” Seneca
said in a statement Friday. “At long last, our people will hear,
directly from the Governor, the words we have waited lifetimes for the
State of New York to say — ‘We’re sorry.’”
The U.S. operated or supported 408 national Native American boarding schools
across 37 states between 1819 and 1969, according to a 2022 U.S.
Interior Department report, which detailed rampant physical, sexual and
emotional abuse at many of the schools.
Native American children who attended the boarding schools were
stripped of their cultural identity and suffered abuse, violence, hatred
and in at least several hundred cases, death, at the hands of school
officials, according to the report.
The school system discouraged American Indian, Alaska Native and
Native Hawaiian languages, religions and cultural practices and used
corporal punishment to enforce rules, according to the more than
100-page report, which included information on marked and unmarked
burial sites at or near school facilites, the identification of children
and investigating abuses.
Seneca’s father attended Thomas Indian School, and his grandmother
was removed from her family at the age 11 and forced to attend Carlisle
Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Hochul noted.
“I know the pain and the trauma because I have seen it and felt it in
my own family, just as countless families have borne that pain and
carried it every day for generations,” Seneca said.
Hochul said her visit will fulfill a pledge she made to Seneca in Albany earlier this year.
“No words or actions will ever be able to undo the pain and suffering
of the Seneca people and other Indigenous peoples across the State, but
by visiting the Seneca Nation and the site of the Thomas Indian School
we will mark a new day in our relations,” Hochul said in a statement.
SOURCE: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2025/05/16/hochul-to-apologize-for-new-york-state-s-actions-at-ex-native-american-school
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