Hochul to apologize for 'atrocities' at former New York state-run Native American boarding school

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

My family experienced Indian boarding schools – and genocide

By Rosalyn LaPier  | 11/20/2024

---

This article was originally published by The Conversation and is republished here by permission. Read the original article.

I am a direct descendant of family members that were forced as children to attend either a U.S. government-operated or church-run Indian boarding school. They include my mother, all four of my grandparents and the majority of my great-grandparents.

On Oct. 25, 2024, Joe Biden, the first U.S. president to formally apologize for the policy of sending Native American children to Indian boarding schools, called it one of the most “horrific chapters” in U.S. history and “a mark of shame.” But he did not call it a genocide.

President Biden to apologize for federal Indian boarding schools

Yet, over the past 10 years, many historians and Indigenous scholars have said that what happened at the Indian boarding schools “meets the definition of genocide.”

From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices.

The U.S. government operated the boarding schools directly or paid Christian churches to run them. Historians and scholars have written about the history of Indian boarding schools for decades. But, as Biden noted, “most Americans don’t know about this history.”

As an Indigenous scholar who studies Indigenous history and the descendant of Indian boarding school survivors, I know about the “horrific” history of Indian boarding schools from both survivors and scholars who contend they were places of genocide.

Was it genocide?

The United Nations defines “genocide” as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Scholars have researched different cases of genocide of Indigenous peoples in the United States.

Historian Jeffery Ostler, in his 2019 book “Surviving Genocide,” argues that the unlawful annexation of Indigenous lands, the deportation of Indigenous peoples and the numerous deaths of children and adults that occurred as they walked hundreds of miles from their homelands in the 19th century constitute genocide.

The mass killings of Indigenous peoples after gold was found in the 19th century in what is now California also constitutes genocide, writes historian Benjamin Madley in his 2017 book “An American Genocide.” At the time, a large migration of new settlers to California to mine gold brought with it the killing and displacement of Indigenous peoples.

Other scholars have focused on the forced assimilation of children at Indian boarding schools. Sociologist Andrew Woolford argues that scholars need to start calling what happened at Indian boarding schools in the 19th and 20th century “genocide” because of the “sheer destructiveness of these institutions.”

Woolford, a former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, explains in his 2015 book “This Benevolent Experiment” that the goal of Indian boarding schools was the “forcible transformation of multiple Indigenous peoples so that they would no longer exist as an obstacle (real or perceived) to settler colonial domination on the continent.”

First- and second-grade students sit in a classroom at the former Genoa Indian Industrial School in Genoa, Neb. Researchers are now trying to locate the bodies of more than 80 Native American children buried near the school. National Archives/AP

Indigenous writers have explained how this transformation at Indian boarding schools occurred. “Federal agents beat Native children in such schools for speaking Native languages, held them in unsanitary conditions, and forced them into manual and dangerous forms of labor,” writes Indigenous law professor Maggie Blackhawk.

Indigenous peoples tell Biden: ‘Sorry is not enough’

Editorial By Editor

President Joe Biden did something that no U.S. president has done. He offered a formal apology for the horrific, racist abuse suffered by Native American and Alaska Native children in so-called American Indian boarding schools. Biden apologized on Oct. 25 outside of Phoenix, Arizona, at the Gila River Indian Community, at a meeting which included tribal leaders, survivors and their families.

The timing and place of this apology raises eyebrows since it comes within two weeks of the Nov. 5 presidential election, and Native Americans make up 5% of the overall population of Arizona, which is a “swing state.” 

Beginning in 1819, thousands of Native American and Alaska Native children were kidnapped from their homes and sent away to schools (in reality, concentration camps), where they were denied the right to their cultures, languages, histories and spiritual beliefs. Their long hair was cut, and many of these children were mentally and physically tortured, scarring them for life. 

At least 973 children died in Indian boarding schools operated or supported by the federal government, often from abuse and disease. (The number is likely much higher.) Their labor was superexploited in the schools and by white adults who adopted them or hired them out. Most large American Indian boarding schools closed in the 1980s and 1990s following years of activism, the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

Many of these schools were maintained by the Catholic Church, other Christian denominations and the Mormon Church. 

This abominable treatment was an instrumental part of a centuries-long genocidal campaign waged against Indigenous peoples that began when the butcher Christopher Columbus seized Caribbean islands in 1492, claiming them for the Spanish monarchy.

While many who attended the Oct. 25 meeting were heartened to hear Biden’s apology, others said that the apology wasn’t nearly enough to reverse the long-lasting physical and psychological harm done to those forced to attend the schools and to the generations that followed. 

Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, a 79-year-old member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, who suffered severe mistreatment at a school in South Dakota that left her with a lifelong, painful limp, said, “Sorry is not enough. Nothing is enough when you damage a human being. A whole generation of people and our future was destroyed for us.” She and others are asking what comes next after the apology. (Associated Press, Oct. 25) 

Indigenous activists and allies protest in Boston.

United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the main organizer of the annual National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, stated on its Facebook page in anticipation of the president’s Oct. 25 announcement: “Biden to issue apology, without reparations, for U.S. Indian boarding schools. Nothing pledged to help Native children and families now dealing with intergenerational trauma, disproportionate number of children in care and all the other effects of genocidal U.S. anti-family policies.”

UAINE continued: “No increased support for Indigenous language revitalization. Not to mention the necessity of landback. Nor the fact that this is being done for votes by an administration actively committing genocide. And free Leonard Peltier!”

Any formal apology by a U.S. president to an oppressed people, such as one President Bill Clinton made in 1997 to African Americans regarding slavery and Biden made recently to Indigenous peoples, is certainly a concession.  But these apologies for state-sanctioned atrocities are toothless, because their white supremacist legacies remain intact. 

Workers World is in total solidarity with UAINE and other Indigenous peoples in demanding that reparations be put in place to make any kind of apology real for those who are still fighting for their right to basic human rights, sovereignty and self-determination. 

Otherwise, these apologies amount to nothing but grandstanding.

https://www.workers.org/2024/10/81636/

DO MORE THAN APOLOGIZE: Native American Leaders Call Again for Action After Boarding Schools Apology

The timing of the APOLOGY did seem strange but it is ELECTION season... Trace

By Marianna McMurdock | October 31, 2024  

  

Native American leaders and survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system are calling on the Biden administration to do more than apologize to facilitate healing for their communities.

Their calls have been mounting for decades, but the remarks marked a milestone: the first time a U.S. President ever acknowledged and apologized for the system where federal agents removed children from their parents, often at gunpoint, sending them to schools thousands of miles from home, stripping families of their language and culture.

 

 

 

 

The exact number of children who were forced into boarding schools in the U.S. for over 150 years is unknown, due to poor record keeping, but nearly 19,000 have been confirmed. Physical, sexual and psychological abuse was rampant at the schools often run by religious institutions. Some children were referred to only as numbers, pre-teen girls were raped and sent home pregnant. Thousands never returned home.

Native American girls from the Omaha tribe at Carlisle School, Pennsylvania. (Getty Images)

Addressing the public on the Gila River Reservation outside of Phoenix, Arizona on October 25, President Joe Biden fulfilled a long-delayed promise to visit Indian country and called the boarding school system a “sin on our soul,” adding there was “no excuse” for how long-overdue the acknowledgement was and that “no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy. But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”

The timing of the visit has also been noted as a tactic in the swing state to woo Native voters to cast votes for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. But many Native Americans are frustrated by government inaction to adequately protect lands, provide access to quality education and healthcare, and enact an arms embargo against Israel.

TOP PHOTO: A protester holds a sign as US President Joe Biden speaks at the Gila River Crossing School in the Gila River Indian Community, in Laveen Village, near Phoenix, Arizona on October 25, 2024. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images)

Survivors and descendants both acknowledge how meaningful Biden’s speech was after centuries of fighting for recognition from the federal government, and call on the administration to act swiftly on the apology.

“In his last two weeks in office, we demand that President Biden also pass S.1723/H.R.7227: The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act,” said the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit that has worked with survivors and Tribal leaders for over a decade to educate about the system and facilitate repatriations.

The legislation would provide a path for investing in language and culture revitalization efforts, educating the American public on the system via museums or curricula, and establishing trauma-informed mental health resources.

It would also enable subpoenas to be used to investigate the scale of the system: Catholic entities have been able to hold onto private records for decades, some of which contain the only known photographs or remnants of survivors’ ancestors. Reintroduced in both the Senate and House last year, the bill has yet to reach a vote.

The mental and physical health concerns of survivors and lack of widespread reconciliation reached national spotlight earlier this year when the Interior Department released its final investigative report on the system, which revealed at least 1,000 Indigenous children died or were killed. The schools operated using over $23 billion federal dollars, adjusted for inflation.

Left: Portrait of Justin Shedee (Apache) from 1889 (Cumberland County Historical Society) Right: Letter from Justin Shedee expressing his wish to leave Carlisle (National Archives and Records Administration via Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

Thousands were subject to child labor to operate facilities and be “outed,” working without wage for white families near the schools.

Angelique Albert, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and chief executive of the nation’s largest direct scholarship provider for Native students, Native Forward, referred to the boarding schools not as places of education but as places of “extermination.”

Just as slavery was used as the tool to harm Black people across the Americas, “education was the tool to harm us, to assimilate us. That’s the tool where we lost our children,” Albert said, adding that the apology is a testament to the work done by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American cabinet member and former recipient of their scholarships, to unearth survivor testimony and investigate the system.

“She’s in the very position that implemented the boarding schools. Do you understand? It gives me chills,” Albert said, emphasizing how critical it is for the federal government to maintain close relationships with Tribal nations and put more funding behind college access for Native youth so their voices can be heard in positions they’ve been historically excluded from.

While the apology, however late, is a “critical first step in the truth and reconciliation process for Native and Indigenous communities,” Albert stressed, “Indian boarding school policies are not a horror of the past — these institutions operated through 1969, and many Native people who were subjected to these cruel policies are still living today.”

Shower in the girls dorm on the Blackfoot Reservation, Cutbank Boarding School (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Morrow, May 1951)

The boarding school system, while the focus of President Biden’s remarks, was not the only widespread, forced removal of Native children. Throughout the 60s and 70s, over a third were removed from their families and overwhelmingly placed in non-Indian homes after discriminatory welfare investigations.

In Washington, Native children were placed in foster care and adopted at rates 19 times greater than their peers. The practice was widespread until 1978’s Indian Child Welfare Act was passed by Congress, who stated “wholesale separation of Indian children from their families is perhaps the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today.”

Native populations now face disproportionately poor health outcomes, including the highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, which researchers have linked to centuries of genocide, disinvestment and generational trauma.

Following Biden’s address, an Indigenous collective gathered to pray, mourn, sing and push for more action in South Dakota, on the lands of what will soon be the Oceti Sakowin Community Academy, a “culture-based school” for Lakota, Dakota and Nakota children.

“Tonight, we took to the land and reminded the world that we are the children of survivors … We will honor our ancestors by holding this country accountable for what it has done to our people,” NDN Collective president Nick Tilsen said in a release. “The U.S. government tried to exterminate and erase us. We will continue to remind them they have failed at doing so, and the warrior spirit of our ancestors lives in all of us.”

SOURCE: https://www.yahoo.com/news/native-american-leaders-call-again-163000761.html

One word not found in President Biden’s apology is "domination" 

But instead of acknowledging the U.S. government’s ongoing claim of a right of domination over Native nations, Biden’s remarks made it seem as if all of that ended a long time ago. It’s called “A Lie of Omission” by leaving it unmentioned and out of focus. (How funny that the word “mission” is embedded in the word “omission”).

OP-ED: https://stevennewcomb.substack.com/p/on-bidens-recent-apology-for-the

 

An apology, a long time coming

October 25, 2024 By Art Hughes 

President Joe Biden took the historic step to formally apologize for the federal government’s role in the failed Indian Board School era.  The first-of-its-kind acknowledgement comes after Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the final report from a three-year investigation that included formal listening sessions from boarding school survivors and their relatives.  The report documented at least 18,000 Native children who were sent to distant live-in schools where they were forced to abandon their languages and cultures.  They were subjected to extensive physical and sexual abuse.  Nearly 1,000 children died while attending the institutions far from their families.  We’ll hear from Sec. Haaland and others who have been working on building the infrastructure of healing from the Boarding School Era.

President Joe Biden’s remarks from the Gila River Indian Community, Arizona and Remarks from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland before Pres. Biden’s boarding schools apology:

LISTEN:  https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/friday-october-25-2024-an-apology-a-long-time-coming/

 

President Biden to Make Historic Apology for Federal Indian Boarding School System

The presidential apology fulfills the first of eight recommendations made in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, Volume II, released by the Interior Department in June 2024. The 105-page report was penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) at the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), the first ever cabinet secretary in U.S. history.  

“This is incredibly meaningful to have a sitting president admit the wrongdoings of the government, and I'm just honored to see this happen during my lifetime,” Haaland said in an interview with Native News Online. “I'm incredibly grateful to the president. He is courageous, he's kind, and he really is committed to Indian Country.” 

 

https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/president-biden-to-make-historic-apology-for-federal-indian-boarding-school-system

It’s long past time for our country to apologize publicly for what it did to Native people

 Ed. Note: It's time Native People correct the his-story, our-story, and that won't be easy. TL Hentz

 

A dozen long years ago, we led the congressional effort to issue an official apology by the U.S. government to Native peoples. Now it's time for the U.S. president to make good on that sentiment and say it publicly.

It’s time — long past time — to officially acknowledge what our country did and to speak an apology. Not only for taking children from Native families, but for the broken treaties and the carnage visited upon First Nations people by U.S. government policy. Without this necessary step, the healing process our community desperately needs cannot truly commence, and we cannot repair the resentment that stems from our troubled past.

GOOD READ: Opinion | It’s long past time for our country to apologize publicly for what it did to Native people - The Washington Post

 

“They killed our spirit. They killed us.”

Haudenosaunee boarding school survivors seek justice

New York news | NOELLE E.C. EVANS | WXXI | June 10, 2021

“Physical beatings were a matter of course. Food deprivation occurred almost all the time. People ask me, ‘What was your overall feeling of this place?’ And I say, ‘Well, it was hunger,'” said Doug George, whose Akwasasne Mohawk name is Kanentiio. (photo above)

Kanentiio, whose name means “handsome pine,” describes life at an Indian boarding school, also known as a residential school, in the 1960s.

The first such facility, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was founded in the 1870s by military Capt. Richard Pratt. It was a way to assimilate Native American children into “white” society and, in Pratt’s words, “kill the Indian to save the man.”

“The intent was to extinguish us as Aboriginal people and destroy whatever sense of self-worth we had, and I can say that they succeeded to a large degree,” Kanentiio said. “They killed our spirit. They killed us.”

Many students sent to these schools went missing. Last month, 215 children’s remains were discovered in British Columbia at one of nearly 500 boarding schools in Canada and the U.S.

The discovery has sparked renewed calls for justice from Indigenous communities and for further investigations — forensic and archeological — into more residential schools.

“It’s high time that this American country recognizes the great value and resource in its indigenous populations and celebrates and promotes and supports,” said Michael Galban, curator at the Seneca Art and Culture Center at Ganondagan State Historic Site.

Last year, Democrats in the U.S. Senate introduced a bill that would create a Truth and Healing Commission, which would investigate and document past injustices of what they call the federal government’s cultural genocide. So far, the bill has not progressed in any fashion.

Undoing this magnitude of injustice would take multiple long-term solutions, Galban said, starting with policy changes.

“It would involve language restoration,” he said. “It would involve environmental restorations. It would involve, in some cases, restoring people to their original homelands.”

It would also mean recording oral histories of survivors’ experiences.

“Every day, we’re losing the stories from the survivors as they age out and pass away,” he said. “Hopefully they’re sharing their stories with their families.”

Survivors’ stories Galban’s grandmother, Evelyn Evans Galban, was a residential school survivor.

In the 1920s, she was taken from her home in California and sent to the Stewart Indian School in Nevada, where Galban said she experienced abuse.

“The idea was that you could strip these Indian children of their culture and their ideologies and create a new cheap labor class that certain areas of the country could exploit,” Galban said.

During the school year, she was taught how to fold laundry, set tables and make beds, he said. During school breaks, she couldn’t go home.

“During the summers, these schools would hire out the students under the guise that they would be learning how to live amongst the whites,” Galban said. “But really, they were being farmed out to hotels and resorts to be their domestic labor.”

She attempted to run away multiple times. On one occasion, she was caught “in the middle of the winter. They took away her shoes and basically whipped her back to school with no shoes on,” Galban said.

Finally, with the help of a cousin, she managed to run away to Montana, Galban said.

No choice Indian boarding schools were compulsory at the time. It would be another 12 years before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 would give Native American parents the legal right to refuse their children’s placement in these kinds of schools off reservations.

Until then, Native leadership and families were essentially held hostage by the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada.

“If there was ever, whether it be by leadership or families, any action to stop or take their children (back), they were often persecuted and arrested and faced problems for that as well,” said Mohawk Grandchief Abram Benedict.

In 1966, Kanentiio was 11 years old when police and social services took him from the St. Regis Mohawk Reserve near Ottawa, Canada, and sent him nearly 350 miles west to the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario.

He’s now one of about 40 remaining Mohawk survivors.

At the school, Kanentiio said the abuse came not just from staff but also from older students who he said were encouraged to discipline the younger students.

After a few years, he managed to escape — first by way of expulsion: He and his classmates were non-compliant, troublemakers.

“Our rude behavior was our survival,” Kanentiio said. “We couldn’t just simply be compliant. We had to fight, physically if necessary, to stop these things from happening.”

Still, when he was expelled, he wasn’t sent back to the reservation. He was put into foster care and bounced around from one home to the next until he eventually managed to run away back home, he said.

More than 50 years later, Kanentiio wishes he could confront those personally responsible for the brutal treatment, abuse, and for ripping families apart.

“It’s a terrible thing to walk around believing that you’re not truly a human being or a complete human being,” he said. “Something deep and wonderful has been lost. And that’s the terror of this thing.”