Taos Pueblo, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
On Friday, October 24, 2024, President Joe Biden formally apologized to the indigenous peoples of North America for the abuses committed against thousands of indigenous children in so-called “residential schools,” which were intended to “kill the Indian in the child.” The apology was tardy, considering that over a period of 150 years, US-government-funded boarding schools had forcibly taken indigenous children away from their families in an effort to “Americanize” them, suppress their cultural identity, and ultimately assimilate them into the American social fabric.
Biden described the residential schools as “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.” He called for a moment of silence to “remember those lost and the generations living with that trauma.” It is estimated that at least 18,000 children were taken from their families and forced to attend some 408 boarding schools across 37 states and U.S. territories between 1819 and 1969. Three years ago, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, commissioned the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to review the schools’ impacts on Native Americans. Their final report was issued in the summer of 2024, finding that at least 973 Native American children had died while attending these federal institutions. Biden commented that it remains important “that we do know there were generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they never met, who spoke a language they had never heard.”
Biden’s remarks were made at the Gila Crossing Community School outside of Phoenix, Arizona, where he was traveling in connection with the Harris presidential campaign. This was the first time Biden had visited Indigenous communities as president and the first time in 10 years that a sitting president visited tribal lands. Back in 2014, then-President Barack Obama paid a visit to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation on the border of North and South Dakota, and in December 2009, Obama actually issued an apology that was incorporated into a Congressional Resolution[3]. I remember the reaction of Indigenous groups to Obama’s 2009 Apology, namely indifference, as was said to me by a tribal leader: “A tree fell in the forest, and nobody saw it.” Indeed, there was no follow-up and no benefit flowed to the American indigenous communities at the time.
The bottom line could be summed up as follows: “Sorry we massacred you, sorry we stole your lands, sorry we destroyed your livelihood. Now, shape up, turn the page, and let’s move together into the future.” Archetypically, the key sentence in the resolution was the disclaimer at the end, according to which: “Nothing in this Joint Resolution—(1) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or (2) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”
Public Reaction to the Apologies
In the press, one reads that “For many Native Americans, the long-awaited apology was a welcome acknowledgment of the government’s longstanding culpability. Now, they say, words must be followed up by action. Bill Hall, 71, of Seattle, was 9 when he was taken from his Tlingit community in Alaska and forced to attend a boarding school, where he endured years of physical and sexual abuse that led to many more years of shame. When he first heard that Biden was going to apologize, he wasn’t sure he would be able to accept it. ‘But as I was watching, tears began to flow from my eyes,’ Hall said. ‘Yes, I accept his apology. Now, what can we do next?’ Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, a 79-year-old citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said she felt “a tingle in my heart” and was glad the historical wrong was being acknowledged. Still, she remains saddened by the irreversible harms done to her people. Whirlwind Soldier suffered severe mistreatment at a school in South Dakota that left her with a lifelong, painful limp. The Catholic-run, government-subsidized facility took away her faith and tried to stamp out her Lakota identity by cutting off her long braids, she 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.”
There was also President Bill Clinton’s apology to the Hawaiian peoples, Public Law 103-150, a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress adopted in 1993 that “acknowledges that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the U.S.” and confirmed that the Native Hawaiian people never relinquished to the U.S. their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands. Predictably, the resolution was little more than a public relations show because the U.S. never envisaged the reestablishment of the Hawaiian Kingdom (I personally know the heir to the Hawaiian throne), nor intended to make the least reparation, individually or collectively, to the Hawaiians whose lives were disrupted, whose properties were confiscated, whose lands were polluted. This is the kind of hypocrisy that U.S. presidents and the U.S. Congress engage in on a regular basis.
By comparison, in 2007, the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, issued an apology to the native Aborigenes[6]. The Australian Resolution did have some beneficial effects, as many Aborigenes recovered lands[7] and enjoyed a degree of compensation.
Sequels of settler colonialism and forced assimilation
Medical and sociological studies document the physical and psychological sequelae suffered by indigenous children who endured abuse, separation from their families, and being cut off from their roots, language, and traditions, while being subjected to forced indoctrination aimed at imposing an alien Western-compatible identity[8]. The rate of suicide among these unfortunate individuals is reported to be higher than that of the rest of the population[9]. Doubtless, these Native American boarding schools were incompatible with Christian values and the fundamentals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As so often happens, apologetics and propaganda have made it appear as if these federal institutions were intended to “help” the hapless children and prepare them for a good life in free Western societies. As psychiatrists have observed in other cases, including those concerning survivors of the Holocaust[10] and survivors of the expulsion of 14 million Germans (with 2 million deaths) from their homelands at the end of World War II[11], the trauma continues with the children and even grandchildren of the direct victims.
Tamara Starblanket published a brilliant dissertation in 2020 on the Canadian “residential schools” and the racist ideologies that led to their establishment and the effort to “kill the Indian within them.” As Noam Chomsky wrote in a blurb: “Settler-colonialism reveals the brutal face of imperialism in some of its most vicious forms. This carefully researched and penetrating study focuses on one of its ugliest manifestations, the forcible transfer of indigenous children, and makes a strong case for Canadian complicity in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ – with implications that reach to the Anglosphere generally, and to some of the worst crimes of the ‘civilized world’ in the modern era.”
In recent decades a number of researchers and organizations in the US and Canada have shed light on the cultural genocide committed on Indigenous populations in the Americas and elsewhere. In the United States a PBS documentary opened the eyes of millions of Americans about our legacy of cultural genocide[14]. In Canada, we can refer to “Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada – A Summary of an Ongoing, Independent Inquiry into Canadian Native ‘Residential Schools’ and their Legacy”, is a study by Rev. Kevin D. Annett, MA, MDiv. The report is published by The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, a public investigative body continuing the work of previous Tribunals into native residential schools: The Justice in the Valley Coalition’s Inquiry into Crimes Against Aboriginal People, convened in Port Alberni, British Columbia, on December 9, 1994, and The International Human Rights Association of American Minorities Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools was held in Vancouver, BC, from June 12-14, 1998.
Identity is a Human Right
As I elaborate in my “new functional paradigm of human rights”[15], the right to identity is crucial for the well-being of each individual, for the development of the individual personality, in short, for the “pursuit of happiness”. Identity means the right to be you, the right to be me, without being forced by the government or society to relinquish our authentic traditions, convictions, and aspirations. Cultural identity is necessary for a sense of orientation, a pre-condition for the ability to integrate into a collectively, for the exercise of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. A human being needs to know his/her origins, culture, history, traditions. A person deprived of historical memory is more often than not lost in the world and deprived of the capacity to interrelate with the environment and with others. One must know who one is.
The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples[16] reaffirms both individual and collective rights, in particular, the right of self-determination and sovereignty over natural resources, the right to say “no” to private or government prospecting in and exploitation of indigenous lands, the right to identity and language, to education, health, employment, language. It outlaws discrimination against indigenous peoples and promotes their full and effective participation in all matters that concern them. It also ensures their right to remain distinct and to pursue their own priorities in economic, social and cultural development. Of course, the “Declaration” is only a pious expression of “soft law”, not a “hard law” treaty, and countries largely ignore it.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
There are numerous organizations, groups, and civil society leaders currently advocating for the recognition of Indigenous rights in the US and Canada, for “affirmative action” to save what may still be saved of the culture of these communities that flourished in North America before the arrival on their continent of millions of “migrant” Anglo-Saxons, Scots, Irish, French, Germans, Italians, Poles and Ukrainians. There is a movement in Canada called “idle no more”[17], there are numerous non-governmental organizations, including the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities[18], the Koani Foundation[19], the Indigenous Peoples and Nations Coalition[20], the Indigenous Foundation[21], the American Indian Council[22], etc., all of whom have consultative status with the United Nations. I have heard their statements at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Under Canadian Law, there is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission[23], which has shed light on the abuses committed in the residential schools for Indigenous children. There is also a private organization of the survivors of Residential Schools in Canada[24]. As yet, there is no similar institution in the United States[25], and Human Rights Watch has been pushing for the establishment of just such a Truth and Healing Commission on Indigenous Boarding Schools[26] in the United States. Recently, Native advocates, survivors, and members of the US Congress have introduced a federal bill that would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to examine the full range of harms from the boarding school system.
No Plan of Action
Thus far there is no concrete plan of action to help the victims of the residential schools or their relatives. Alas, the legacy of the indignities committed against Indigenous continues unabated. Biden acknowledged that “no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” although “we’re finally moving forward into the light.” Will there be a coherent program of action to help Indigenous communities throughout the US and Canada cope with their considerable problems, including extreme poverty and unemployment? Alex White Plume, 73, a former president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who attended two boarding schools on reservations in South Dakota, told NBC News he would not accept the apology from president Biden: “I don’t really see any way where we could accept it, because it doesn’t change anything… We need to survive, and in order to survive we need our territories back so we could bring back our language and perform the ceremonies that are specific to places in our territory …So I don’t want to accept an apology. I want them to be meaningful. And if it’s a meaningful apology, he would say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna investigate the genocide, and we’ll establish a process to create protocols on how to go about it.’ I think something like that would have been more meaningful.”[27]
Remedies
Victims of injustice want action, not rhetoric. Indigenous victims and their representatives can address complaints and petitions to the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples[28], to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues[29], which will hold its 24th session in April 2025[30], and to the Expert Mechanism on Indigenous Peoples[31]. With respect to Canada, the Indigenous can submit cases to the UN Human Rights Committee pursuant to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights[32] with a view to obtaining a ruling from the Committee and a recommendation to provide an “adequate remedy,” as is the Committee’s jargon. This is not yet possible with respect to American Indigenous tribes because the United States has thus far refused to ratify the Optional Protocol to ICCPR.
The harm caused to indigenous communities in North America, in the United States, Alaska and Canada is incalculable. Personally, I do not see how it could ever be repaired. The Indigenous of North America has a truncated history and a broken identity. This is the result of deliberate cultural genocide. The US and Canada cannot reverse the fact that when the Anglo-Saxons and French came to North America, there were some ten million Algonquins, Crees, Cherokees, Dakotas, Hopi, Iroquois, Lakotas, Mohawks, Pequots, Seminoles, Sioux, Squamish, Tlingits in the continent. At the end of the 19th century, there were barely 300,000. In this sense, the genocide was successful[33].
As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1964 in his book Why We Can’t Wait, “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation that tried, as a matter of national policy, to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.”[34]
Unfortunately, sixty years after Dr. King wrote those words, racism against Indigenous Americans persists, and many do not forget the signs that used to hang in South Dakota stores – in Arizona near the Navajo “Reservation” and in so many other places in the American West: “No dogs or Indians allowed.”[35] This kind of humiliation is difficult to forget. By comparison, the new awareness of the injustices committed in the residential schools pale in the genocidal landscape. These victims are but the last vestiges of the annihilation process.
The mindset that led to cultural genocide
U.S. Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt is notorious for a speech in which he demanded assimilation of the indigenous peoples of America: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”[36] The speech was delivered in 1892 during the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Denver. Colorado. The full-text copy of his speech, as printed in the published proceedings of the conference, was drawn from the HathiTrust Digital Library. The ideas expressed in Pratt’s speech are central to the development of the Carlisle Indian School (founded 1879) and other boarding schools across the US, which aimed to “civilize” the “Indian”. Indeed, the intent to destroy the indigenous mentality affected not only the direct victims but also their families and, more broadly, the societies where they lived and still live.
The Canadian panorama is not unlike the American. At the height of the Canadian effort to “assimilate” the “Indians” we recognize a militant racist, Duncan Campbell Scott, a civil servant in the Canadian “Department of Indian Affairs,” perhaps the most ardent supporter of the residential schools and the policies that accompanied them: the removal by consent or by force of tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes, some as young as two or four years of age; the attempts to deprive these children of any connections with their parents; the institution of an underfunded system where thousands of students perished from malnutrition, poor medical care, and disease; the creation of an education system where child labor was a norm and where academic achievements were severely compromised. In 1920, Scott also promoted an amendment to the Indian Act, making school attendance compulsory for all First Nations children under 15 years of age. When he ordered compulsory school attendance in 1920, he stated: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”
After-thought: Indigenous in Central and South America
By comparison, it is worth noting that although the indigenous population of Central and South America endured the criminal onslaught of the Spanish conquistadores[37], the Spanish model of “colonization” did not implement the same kind of cultural genocide as in North America. Indeed, whoever travels to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, etc. soon discovers that indigenous cultures in Central and South America are very much alive, numbering in the tens of millions of human beings, speaking their own indigenous languages, Quechua, Aymara, Mapuche, Uru-Chipaya, that they continue to practice their old traditions, in short, that they manage to preserve their identities. They were never subjected to the level of humiliation and cultural genocide that characterized the Anglo-Saxon and French settlement of North America. Still, there is a long way to go to their rehabilitation, since racial discrimination persists in South America and large indigenous groups like the Mapuche in Chile are denied their inalienable right of self-determination.
It occurs to me that the “elites” of North and South America could learn a few things from the indigenous[38]. As the Indigenous former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales is reported to have said: “Sooner or later we will have to recognize that the Earth has rights too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.”
Let us hope that the “elites” in all countries listen, recognize the immensity of the crime against the indigenous peoples, and make an effort to rehabilitate the survivors, giving them, at the very least, the rights enunciated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Notes.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/25/politics/biden-apologizes-native-americans-abusive-boarding-schools/index.html
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/28/biden_residential_schools
[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5051912/interior-dept-report-indian-boarding-schools
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/14/text
[4] https://www.mlive.com/native-american-news/2024/11/native-americans-laud-biden-for-historic-apology-over-boarding-schools-they-want-action-to-follow.html
[5] https://hawaii-nation.org/publawsum.html
[6] https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/national-apology
[7] https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/mabo-decision
[8] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/blog/2021/11/healing-trauma-federal-residential-indian-boarding-schools https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blog/legacy-of-trauma-the-impact-of-american-indian-boarding-schools-across-generations
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/a-century-of-trauma-at-boarding-schools-for-native-american-children-in-the-united-states
[9] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/residential-schools-intergenerational-trauma-kamloops-1.6052240
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5809999/
[10] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-leadership/202301/how-do-holocaust-survivors-cope-with-extreme
[11] Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge, London and Boston.
[12] Tamara Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children, Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State. Clarity Press, Atlanta. 2020. https://www.claritypress.com/product/suffer-the-little-children-genocide-indigenous-nations-and-the-canadian-state/
[13] https://www.facinghistory.org/en-ca/resource-library/killing-indian-child
[14] https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blog/legacy-of-trauma-the-impact-of-american-indian-boarding-schools-across-generations
[15] Alfred de Zayas, Building a Just World Order, Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2021.
A New Functional Paradigm of Human Rights
[16] https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/un-declaration-rights-indigenous-peoples. Adopted by a vote of 143 in favour to 4 against (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States).
[17] https://idlenomore.ca/
[18] https://ihraam.org/
[19] http://www.koanifoundation.org/Mission_%26_Purpose.html
[20] https://cendoc.docip.org/collect/cendocdo/index/assoc/HASH01fb/0a6e3dbd.dir/JS46_UPR22_USA.pdf
[21] https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/us-residential-schools
[22] https://indiancouncil.net/
[23] https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525
[24] https://www.irsss.ca/
[25] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/16/does-america-need-a-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-395332
[26] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/18/us-truth-and-healing-commission-indigenous-boarding-schools-long-overdue
[27] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-apologizes-forced-native-american-boarding-school-policy-caused-rcna177242
[28] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-indigenous-peoples
[29] https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/unpfii
[30] https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/unpfii/unpfii-twenty-fourth-session-21-april-2-may-2025
[31] https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrc-subsidiaries/expert-mechanism-on-indigenous-peoples
[32] Jakob Möller/Alfred de Zayas, United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law, N.P.Engel, Strasbourg 2009.
[33] David Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1992. Richard Drinnon, Facing West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Alfred de Zayas, Countering Mainstream Narratives, Clarity Press, 2022, Chapter 17 on the “Unsung Victims.”
[34] Why we can’t wait, p. 141, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/dr-king-spoke-out-against-the-genocide-of-native-americans/
[35] https://www.hcn.org/issues/49.17/opinion-racism-against-native-americans-persists. https://www.columbiagorgenews.com/archive/the-story-has-another-chapter-first-indigenous-peoples-day-observed/article_ef115dbe-b3b4-596e-9e35-7b9b95f5f112.html
https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2020/06/22/in-gallup-surrounded-by-the-navajo-nation-a-pandemic-crosses-paths-with-homelessness-hate-and-healers/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-nov-02-na-trailmix2-story.html
[36] https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-him-and-save-man-r-h-pratt-education-native-americans
[37] Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, https://web.as.uky.edu/history/faculty/myrup/his208/Casas,%20Bartolome%20de%20las%20-%20Short%20Account%20(1992,%20excerpts).pdf
[38] https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097382
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135732
