RUBENSTEIN: The 'sin' on America's soul

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.On Friday, October 25, U.S. President Joe formally apologized for the US government's country’s role in establishing America’s 159-year-old Indian Boarding School system, a project that formed the model for Canada’s federally-funded Indian Residential Schools.“It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said in a visit to the Gila River Indian Community on the outskirts of Phoenix. “Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make.”“The federal Indian boarding school policy — the pain it has caused will only be a significant mark of shame, a blot on our record history. For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books, not taught in our schools.”“I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did,” Biden said, ignoring the probable reality he knew next to nothing about these schools before he was given this address to read.The story of these Indian Boarding Schools began in 1819 when the American Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act whose purpose was “providing against the further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes, adjoining the frontier settlements of the United States, and for introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization.” The Act was officially struck down by the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.“Providing against further decline and final extinction” was no fake rationale for promoting socio-economic integration, a process with many positive and negative features that has characterized the human condition for millennia.Before Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, what became the United States had an estimated population of three million people; by 1819, it had nosedived by 90 percent to 300,000.As in Canada, native Americans suffered high fatality rates from contact with European diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis that were new to them and to which they had not yet acquired immunity. They also faced starvation across the West as the bison and other fur-bearing animals they depended on for subsistence and trade were decimated by both indigenous and non-indigenous overhunting.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 joined Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president as he delivered his Friday speech.Like the six-volume final report (2015) of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the two-volume Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report (see here and here) Haaland sponsored damned the American boarding schools for “forcing” children to attend institutions where they were physically, emotionally and sexually abused, stripped on their indigenous cultures, and where more than 950 died.These assertions and the misinterpretation of the motives for building the schools — to allow indigenous children to adapt to the challenges of a rapidly changing society — have even less credibility than their Canadian counterparts.Canada’s indigenous population in 1881, two years before the first Indian Residential School opened, was 108,547, or one-third of its American counterpart. Approximately 150,000 Canadian aboriginal children, representing no more than one-third of eligible students, attended these schools for an average of 4.5 years over their 114-year existence, 1883-1997. The 18,000 or so American Indians who attended more than 500 boarding schools over its 159-year period may have represented less than one-tenth of all eligible children. This figure could not possibly have led to massive school-induced cultural genocide.Biden also used the event to tout his administration’s investments in Indian Country. According to the White House, tribal nations received $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan, $13 billion in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build high-speed Internet, roads, bridges, public transit, and clean water sanitation infrastructure. This spending shows how eager America’s indigenous people have been since first contact to absorb the wonders of Western civilization, thereby countering the “cultural genocide” libel.This civilizational eagerness is embedded in pre-existing indigenous lifeways. As Conrad Black has rightly pointed out, “Many of the things we think of as touchstones of an advanced technological society — agriculture, written languages, metallurgy and knitted fabrics and materials — were largely or entirely absent. Even the wheel was not to be found.”One Montana boarding school testifier said, “Before the Indian boarding schools, we took wagonloads of laundry down to the river, and all my aunts would wash their clothes in the river on the rocks; and we would hang them over the willow trees that would grow in there, while we fished. We lived off wildlife. I never knew you bought meat from a market. We lived off the deer, the rabbits, pheasants, prairie dogs.”How many indigenous people would like to resurrect that lifestyle?As for the average death rate of six children a year at over 500 schools, a tragedy to be sure, this is not unexpected given the lack of resistance to foreign diseases. Nor does it mean all these children died and were buried at the schools rather than in their home communities or that the school death rates were higher than the corresponding death rates on their reservations.As in the case of Canada’s residential schools, the testimonies of former students who reported physical, emotional, and sexual abuse were never subjected to impartial investigation or corroboration during their so-called listening sessions.Similarly, nothing in the two volumes proves that children were forced or coerced to attend these boarding schools.Nor is there any acknowledgement of the generosity of the American government in funding these institutions: $23.3 billion in fiscal year 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars between 1871 and 1969 for the Federal Indian boarding school system as well as other similar institutions and associated integration policies.The alternative, as in the case of countless other extinct indigenous ethnic groups around the world, was to allow them to slowly but surely die out by their gradual absorption into the dominant cultural group. “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.Too bad this history now includes a distorted picture of the country’s Indian Boarding Schools.Silly as his speech was, there was method in Biden’s madness. Delivered in Arizona with Election Day a little over a week away with polls showing a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, it was a wise move. Arizona is a battleground state — one of seven likely to determine the election outcome — and one where Native American voters offer to be a crucial bloc.The U.S. government has offered apologies for other historic injustices. 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. It’s unclear what action, if any, will follow Friday’s apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the possible but not probable remains of boarding school children on federal lands. Past precedent however, suggests that the Americans will be far less willing to satisfy the enormous financial demands readily acceded to by their easily beguiled Canadian counterparts.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.