NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — President Joe Biden said he will formally apologize on Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children for over 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: To make 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 she became the first Native American to lead the agency, and she will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president as he delivers a speech Friday at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.
“I would never 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 to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”
The investigation she launched found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as 4 — were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to dispossess tribal nations of their land.
The investigation documented 973 deaths — while acknowledging the figure is likely higher — and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or the U.S. government's actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian peoples.
The Interior Department conducted listening sessions and gathered the testimony of survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgement of, and apology for, the boarding school era. Haaland said she took that to Biden, who agreed that it was necessary.
“In making this apology, the President acknowledges 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 is never repeated," the White House said in a statement.
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of a wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.
The visit by Biden and Haaland to the Gila River Indian Community comes as Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign spends hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting Native American voters in battleground states including Arizona and North Carolina.
“It will be one of the high points of my entire life,” Haaland said of Biden's apology Friday.
It’s unclear what action, if any, will follow the apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands. Some tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army, which has refused to follow federal law regulating 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 across this country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to the AP.
“Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact.”
Friday’s apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action from the federal government, said Melissa Nobles, chancellor of MIT and author of "The Politics of Official Apologies."
“These things have value because it validates the experiences of the survivors and acknowledges they’ve been seen,” Nobles said.
The U.S. government has offered apologies for other historic injustices, including to 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 the overthrow of 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 made a formal apology in 2008. There was also a truth and reconciliation process, and later a plan to inject billions of dollars into communities devastated by the government’s policies.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the 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 policies of assimilation, including the forced removal of children. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a similar concession in 2022.
Hoskin said he is grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading the effort to reckon with the country’s role in a dark chapter for Indigenous peoples. But he emphasized that the apology is just “an important step, which must be followed by continued action.”
FILE - Elders from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in southeastern Montana listen to speakers during a session for survivors of government-sponsored Native American boarding schools, in Bozeman, Mont., Nov. 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)
FILE - Russell Eagle Bear, with the Rosebud Sioux Reservation Tribal Council, talks to U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland during a meeting about Native American boarding schools at Sinte Gleska University in Mission, S.D., on Oct. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)
BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) — The United Nations' annual climate talks pushed into overtime Saturday under a cloud of anger and disappointment as negotiators were well short of a deal on money for developing nations to curb and adapt to climate change.
A draft of the final agreement Friday pledged $250 billion annually by 2035, more than double the previous goal of $100 billion set 15 years ago but far short of the annual $1 trillion-plus that experts say is needed. Through the early hours of Saturday morning, The Associated Press saw lead negotiators from the European Union, the United States and other nations going through the empty halls from meeting to meeting as delegates tried to hash out a new version of the deal.
“We're still working hard,” U.S. climate envoy John Podesta told the AP past 4 a.m. local time. And by late Saturday morning, he and other delegations said talks on a new deal were still ongoing.
Alden Meyer, of the European think tank E3G, said negotiators now have very little room for error.
“They’ve got to make sure whatever they put on the table is something that can fly. ... Because otherwise we start to lose critical mass as ministers start to leave tonight and into tomorrow,” Meyer said. “So, they are under a deadline, but this is when it gets real.”
The climate talks, called COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, were scheduled to end Friday. Workers have already begun dismantling the venue for the talks.
Wealthy nations are obligated to help vulnerable countries under an agreement reached at these talks in Paris in 2015. Developing nations are seeking $1.3 trillion to help adapt to droughts, floods, rising seas and extreme heat, pay for losses and damages caused by extreme weather, and transition their energy systems away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward clean energy.
Representatives of some of the nations that are obliged to contribute the cash said the $250 billion climate finance figure is realistic and reflects their limits at a time when their own economies are stretched.
But on Saturday morning, Irish environment minister Eamon Ryan said that he felt there'll be a new number in the next draft.
"We’ll have to see what the final number is. I don’t think it’ll be the one initially published yesterday," Ryan said. “But it’s not just that number — it's how do you get to 1.3 trillion."
Ryan said that any number reached at the COP will have to be supplemented with other sources of finance, for example through a market for carbon emissions where polluters would pay to offset what they emit.
The amount in any deal reached at COP negotiations — often considered a “core” — will then be mobilized or leveraged for greater climate spending. But much of that means loans for countries drowning in debt.
“We have to get agreement quickly. And I hope and believe we can,” Ryan said.
Vulnerable nations, many already battered by extreme weather made worse largely by emissions from the burning of fossil fuels they've had little to do with were angered by the draft text published on Friday.
“Developed countries must commit trillions, not empty promises," said Harjeet Singh, Director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. "Anything less makes them squarely responsible for the failure of these talks and the betrayal of billions across the globe.”
Meyer of E3G said it’s still up in the air whether a deal will come out of Baku at all.
“It is still not out of the question that there could be an inability to close the gap on the finance issue,” he said. “That obviously is not an ideal scenario.”
Several dozen activists marched in silence outside the halls where delegates meet late Friday, raising and crossing their arms in front of themselves to indicate rejection of the draft text.
Also late Friday, 355 civil society organizations released a letter in support of the G77 and China negotiating group’s rejection of the latest draft.
The letter urged negotiators to “stand up for the people of the Global South," saying that “no deal in Baku is better than a bad deal.”
Lidy Nacpil, a Filipino coordinator with the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, said activists would still be unhappy if the climate finance number doubles to $500 billion.
“We’re still at this point where we are asking developing countries to stay strong and not just give in to far, far less than what should be,” she said.
With bleary eyes, seated around cold pizza, a group of youth activists chatted to keep each other awake through the early hours of Saturday in one of the main halls of the venue.
“All of us are kind of in mourning in a way,” said Jessica Dunne, with the Alliance of Non-Governmental Radical Youth. But the group said being in community eases the painful emotions that come with a process Dunne called an “abject failure.”
“In these halls tonight, as we’re sitting here and we’re talking and we’re dancing and crying and laughing, it kind of gives you hope that there will be another day that we’re going to fight for,” she said.
Associated Press journalists Ahmed Hatem, Aleksandar Furtula and Joshua A. Bickel contributed to this report.
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Marina Silva, Brazil environment minister, stands near a sign for the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
John Podesta, U.S. climate envoy, center right, and U.S. Deputy Climate Envoy Sue Biniaz, center, walk outside the venue for the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
A member of security stands with the Baku Olympic Stadium in the background during the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
Attendees pull luggage as they walk into the venue for the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
Australia Climate Minister Chris Bowen, center, walks through a hallway at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit in the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)
U.S. Deputy Climate Envoy Sue Biniaz, right, and Wopke Hoekstra, EU climate commissioner, second from right, walk out of an elevator during the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit in the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)
John Podesta, U.S. climate envoy, right, walks through the hallways of the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit in the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)
People sleep in the Chinese delegation offices at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit in the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)
Activists demonstrate in silence protesting a draft of a proposed deal for curbing climate change at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
