President Joe Biden on Monday presided over his final White House Tribal Nations Summit by reaching into the nation’s dark past and establishing a new national monument to honor the suffering of thousands of Native children and their families in federal boarding schools in the last century.
His proclamation starts a three-year clock to design a monument to be placed at the flagship Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879, with the stated mission to “kill the Indian” to “save the Man.” Schools like this removed children from their families and forced them to speak English, wear non-native clothing and eschew tribal customs.
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5
Biden memorializes painful past of Native Americans
Earlier this year, Biden described the treatment of thousands of Native children at government boarding schools as “a blot” on the nation’s history.
"The federal government mandated — mandated — removal of children from their families and tribes, launching what's called the federal Indian boarding school era, over a 150-year span, 150 years from the early 1800s to 1970 — one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” he said earlier this year. “We should be ashamed.”
The most recent U.S. Census found that the population of those who consider themselves wholly or partly Native is upward of nearly 9 million. The U.S. Department of the Interior says it serves 1.9 million American Indian and Alaska Natives, many in sovereign lands.
That’s a shadow of the population that historians say thrived on the continent before European colonization. Native Americans were only granted universal U.S. citizenship in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Activists like Elveda Martinez of the Walker River Paiute Tribe say it’s remarkable how recent this history of dispossession and discrimination is.
"It's within our generation that Natives finally all had the right to vote,” she said. “So, that's still a big thing now. We always tell people, you know, it was our parents and people in that generation that fought for the right to vote."
As a group, Native residents have the highest poverty rate in the country, and their youth lag behind other demographics in education, according to a study by a bipartisan research group.
On Monday, Biden detailed his administration’s efforts to improve the livelihoods of descendants of the nation’s pre-colonial populations and to give communities more say, such as designating conservation areas. But he stressed that honoring the past is the way forward.“By making the Carlisle Indian School a national monument, we make clear what great nations do,” he said. “We don’t erase history. We acknowledge it and learn from it, so we never repeat it again.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, praised Biden’s work.
“President Biden has been the best president for Indian Country in my lifetime,” she said. “This is a president and an administration that truly sees Indigenous people and has worked tirelessly to address the issues in Indian Country that have long been underfunded or outright ignored.”
As a sign of her esteem, Haaland, who is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, draped Biden in a personalized parting gift: a black-and-white version of a blanket designed by Pueblo artist Pat Pruitt, who says the motif, which depicts thunder and lightning in the desert, is meant to evoke “the feeling of that calm before the storm that is filled with electricity and sound.”
But as one tribe made clear Monday, America’s Native people are not a monolith.
The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians lashed out at the Biden administration for what the group says is a “lack of tribal consultation” over a wave of proposed off-reservation casinos, including a recent approval for Oregon’s first off-reservation casino.
“It is performative to celebrate an administration’s contributions to Indian Country when the actions tell a very different story,” Cow Creek Umpqua Tribal Chairman Carla Keene said in a statement sent to VOA on Monday. “We have been dismissed and ignored about policy that will devastate our social, cultural, and economic livelihood. There is time to do the right thing and put a stop to the pending decisions that will irreversibly harm Tribes across the Pacific Northwest and West Coast, which is a backwards step in American history, not forward.”
The principal chief of the large and powerful Cherokee nation — which includes about 450,000 people — issued a careful, diplomatic statement Monday advocating for the summit to continue under the next administration.
“I’m looking forward to attending the White House Tribal Nation’s summit this week,” Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. posted on Facebook. “Other than when the summit was not held (2017-2020), I’ve been attending since 2013. I hope it is a productive engagement and I hope it continues on in future years.”
President-elect Donald Trump indicated that he views Native issues as intertwined with energy generation, by naming North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as Interior secretary, while also serving as “White House energy czar.”
"We're going to do things with energy and with land interior that is going to be incredible,” he said, but did not elaborate.
As president, Trump angered Indigenous activists by lifting a ban on the Keystone XL pipeline that cuts through sovereign native lands on its path south from Canada to Texas.
Biden revoked Trump’s permit for the oil pipeline on the first day of his term.