Biden Becomes First President to Apologize to Native Americans for Past Brutality: ‘Long Overdue… We Should Be Ashamed!’

President Joe Biden officially apologized to Native Americans Friday afternoon in Arizona for the abuse of children and other acts on behalf of the federal government in one of his final speeches as commander-in-chief.

The president addressed a crowd in the Gila River Indian Community for programs in previous centuries that removed many Indian children from their homes and placed them in boarding schools where hundreds were killed.

Biden’s apology – the first from a sitting president on behalf of the US government – was directed at tribal members nationwide.

“After 150 years, the United States government eventually stopped the program. But the federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened — until today. I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did. I formally apologize,” Biden said. “That’s long overdue.” He continued:

One of the most horrific chapters of American history. We should be ashamed! The vast majority of Americans don’t know about it. Generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they’d never met, who spoke a language they had never heard. Native communities silenced. Their children’s laughter and play were gone. Children who would arrive at schools, their clothes taken off, their hair that they were told was sacred, chopped off. Their names literally erased, replaced by a number or an English name.

“For too long this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books,” Biden also said. “Not taught in our schools.”

As CBS News reported of the boarding schools:

From 1819 through the 1970s, the federal government and religious institutions established boarding schools throughout the country to assimilate Alaska Native, American Indian and Native Hawaiian children into White American culture by forcibly removing them from their families, communities and belief systems.

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Many children who attended these boarding schools endured emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and hundreds of them died. And for those who did return home, they were wounded in body and spirit, Mr. Biden said. Even after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the atrocities continued.

Watch above via CNN.