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United States President Joe Biden said Thursday he will issue a formal apology for the treatment of Native American children who were forcibly removed from their families by the US government and put into an abusive boarding school system.
For over 150 years, the schools sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans, with a recent government report detailing numerous cases of physical, mental and sexual abuse, as well as the deaths of over 950 children.
“I’m heading to do something that should have been done a long time ago,” the president said as he left the White House. “To make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”
Biden is scheduled to make the official apology Friday on a visit to the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, one of the states with the highest Native American populations in the country and a key battleground in the US election.
