NORMAN, Okla. — President Joe Biden said he would formally apologize Friday for the country’s role in forcing indigenous children for more than 150 years into boarding schools, where many were physically, emotionally and sexually abused and more than 950 died.

“I’m doing something I should have done a long time ago: making a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Biden said Thursday as he left the White House for Arizona.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system shortly after becoming the first Native American to lead the agency and will join Biden on his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president, as he delivers a speech Friday at Gila. River Indian community outside of Phoenix.

“I never would have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “It’s a big deal for me. I’m sure it’s going to be a big deal for all of Indian Country.”

The investigation he launched found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as 4 — were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that tried to assimilate them into white society, while federal authorities and the state were trying to dispossess tribal nations of their land.

The inquiry documented 973 deaths – although it admits the figure is likely higher – and 74 graves associated with the more than 500 schools.

No president has formally apologized for the forced removal of these children—an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations—or for the US government’s actions to decimate Native American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples.

The Department of the Interior held listening sessions and collected the testimonies of survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgment and apology for the boarding school era. Haaland said he brought that up to Biden, who agreed it was necessary.

“In issuing this apology, the president recognizes that we, as a people who love our country, must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from that history so that it never happens again,” the White House said. said in a statement.

The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 with the passage of a comprehensive law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted them. children.

Biden and Haaland’s visit to the Gila River Indian community comes as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting Native American voters in battleground states including Arizona and North Carolina.

“It’s going to be one of the high points of my entire life,” Haaland said of Biden’s apology on Friday.

It is unclear what action, if any, will follow the apology. The Department of the Interior continues to work with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children from federal lands. Some tribes are still at odds with the US military, which has refused to follow federal law governing the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

“President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native people in this country,” Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to the AP.

“Our children have been made to live in a world that has erased their identities, their culture and changed their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools attended by thousands of our Cherokee children. And today, almost every citizen of the Cherokee Nation is feeling the impact in some way.”

Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for further action from the federal government, said Melissa Nobles, chancellor of MIT and author of “The Politics of Official Apologies.”

“These things have value because they validate survivors’ experiences and acknowledge that they’ve been seen,” Nobles said.

The US government has offered apologies for other historical injustices, including the Japanese families it imprisoned during World War II. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to compensate tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Native Hawaiians for overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.

The House and Senate passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But the gestures did not create pathways to reparations for black Americans.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating First Nations and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology in 2008. There was also a truth trial and reconciliation, and later an injection plan. billions of dollars in communities devastated by government policies.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s Indigenous residential school policy, saying the forced assimilation of natives into Christian society destroyed their cultures, separated families and marginalized generations.

“I humbly ask forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples,” Francis said.

In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for his government’s past assimilation policies, including the forced removal of children. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a similar concession in 2022.

Hoskin said he was grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading the effort to consider the country’s role in a dark chapter for indigenous peoples. But he stressed that the apology was only “an important step, which must be followed by continued action”.