On Biden’s Recent Apology for the Cruelty of the U.S. Indian Boarding “Schools”

One word not found in President Biden’s apology is "domination"

Native students at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas in the early 1900s.

On October 25, 2024, President Joe Biden visited the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. He traveled there to deliver an official apology to Native nations and peoples. He apologized for the U.S. government creating a policy which separated tens of thousands of Native children from their parents and loved ones in more than five hundred of those institutions. The children were often horribly and sadistically abused and sometimes even killed. Native children died from diseases in overcrowded conditions.

The U.S. government did all that as a means of destroying our Native languages (through linguicide, the intentional killing of a language), in an effort to destroy our cultures, and our spiritual and ceremonial traditions. It was the U.S. government’s effort to erase everything that held our nations and peoples together cohesively, while establishing U.S. domination on top of millions of acres of our traditional homelands and territories, “real estate” and “resources” worth trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy.

One word that is not found in President Biden’s apology is domination. When we look at a recent report in Indian Country Today (ICT) about the Biden apology, we see how fitting it would have been for both Biden and the ICT reporters to have used the word domination. As the ICT article states, for example:

Tens of thousands of Native children were coerced [domination] or forcibly removed from their families [domination] to attend boarding schools, starting in the 1800s and continuing into the 20th century. The schools operated under a policy of forced assimilation [domination] that kept them isolated from their families, culture and language.

The Indian Country Today article further describes such patterns as follows:

Biden did not mince words in describing the horrors endured by children at the schools, where staff took their traditional clothes, cut their hair and often abused them, psychologically, physically or sexually.

What President Biden did not apologize for, though, is the United States using the so-called boarding “schools” as part of its means of destroying the liberty and free way of life of our Native nations and peoples. He said nothing about U.S. attempts to despotically destroy the liberty of our Ancestors. Instead of pointing to a desire on the part of the United States to restore the liberty of Native nations, Biden said “It’s about restoring your dignity.”

But how is our dignity as Native nations and peoples going to be “restored” in the context of an ongoing and unrelenting claim of a right of domination by the government of the United States? And how can what Biden called “a new era of a nation-to-nation relationship grounded in dignity and respect” ever be the end result of the U.S. government’s unwillingness to end its perpetual claim of a right of domination over our existence of Native nations and peoples?

President Biden said nothing about the U.S. continuing to maintain a system of domination on top of our peoples to this day. Nor did he pledge that the U.S. will begin working to immediately restore our free existence, which is our continuing sacred birthright as Native nations and peoples.

U.S. officials such as Biden consider our original free existence to be gone forever and their okay with that because they consider us to have “become” integrated into America’s body politic by means of the so-called boarding “schools.” In the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, “civilization and Christianity” were “bestowed” upon our ancestors as “ample compensation” for the imperial process of domination, which Marshall called “ascendancy,” thereby ending our free existence.

Chief Justice John Marshall

Marshall on behalf of a unanimous Court said that compensation in the form of European “civilization” [domination] and “Christianity” was “given” to our ancestors “in exchange” for Christian Europeans receiving “unlimited independence.” From whom did the Christian Europeans generously and mentally receive such “independence” while robbing us of ours by means of domination? They received “unlimited independence” from themselves, of course, which led Marshall to say of our Native peoples, “their rights to complete sovereignty as independent nations were necessarily diminished [ended]. . .by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave [a] title [of ‘ultimate dominion’] to those who made it [the ‘discovery’].”

The mental world represented by the above thought process is the origin of the so-called boarding “schools.” The establishment of those institutions and the sadistic behavior inflicted on Native children resulted from the language quoted above. That language is found in an active and ongoing U.S. Supreme Court precedent which presumes a U.S. right of Christian discovery and domination over our nations and peoples, which is traced to the Bible and fifteenth century Vatican papal documents. Given that this is what resulted in the genocidal process of the boarding “schools,” isn’t it high time that we address this in light of President Biden’s words of contrition?

I find it fascinating that Biden traveled to Arizona, a place that was initially invaded and colonized by Spanish soldiers and Catholic priests during the sixteenth century, based on papal documents issued by the Vatican. The Spaniards focused on the physical and spiritual “conquest” of the Southwest. And like the Spanish Catholic missions, the indoctrination centers called “boarding schools” were an outgrowth of that process of temporal and spiritual domination designed to transform a “barbarous” existence into a “human” existence lived permanently under and subject to the invaders’ claim of a right of domination.

But instead of acknowledging the U.S. government’s ongoing claim of a right of domination over Native nations, Biden’s remarks made it seem as if all of that ended a long time ago. It’s called “A Lie of Omission” by leaving it unmentioned and out of focus. (How funny that the word “mission” is embedded in the word “omission”). The words chosen for Biden’s apology pretend to be telling “the truth” while hiding the truth about the U.S. system of domination. It is a system traced back to the Old Testament biblical story of the “Chosen People” and the “Promised Land,” as well as to the Vatican documents of the fifteenth century, and to the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh.

“For our nation,” said President Biden, it [the truth about the abuses of the boarding schools] “was too shameful to acknowledge.” This hardly seems accurate given that a congressional hearing on the abuses of the boarding “schools” was held in 1929. He continued, “While darkness can hide much, it erases nothing … We do not erase history, we make history, we learn history, and we remember, so we can heal as a nation.”

His use of the phrases “our nation” and “so we can heal as a nation” (emphasis added) are designed to reinforce the idea that, as a result of generations of abuse in the boarding “schools” “we” as Native peoples have been “incorporated” into the “body politic” of the United States. Even though Biden appeared be apologizing and disavowing the boarding “school” agenda of assimilation, he was simultaneously using subtle word choices that maintain and advance that agenda in real time.

The Indian Country Today article continues: “In closing, Biden said that Native voices were finally being heard.” However, for those of us who are calling attention to the U.S. claim of a right of domination, our voices are not being listened to. This is undoubtedly because we are calling out the connection between U.S. law and policy as applied to Native nations and ancient Vatican papal documents. When we pinpoint and specify the claim of a right of domination, our voices tend to be ignored. After all, for Biden to have acknowledged that there is an ongoing U.S. system of domination that is currently being used against our nations and peoples in 2024 just might have ruined the moment.

The “America we should be,” said Biden, is one that listens to Native voices. “That’s the America we are,” he continued. (emphasis added) However, the true nature of America is the “American empire” that committed those crimes against our peoples and against Native children to begin with. As far as I as I’m concerned, Biden’s use of the inclusive pronoun “we,” as in, “We Americans,” was his way of once again working the U.S.’s assimilation agenda into his remarks.

It is the very same process of assimilation (domination) that the so-called boarding “schools” were designed to carry out as a genocidal agenda against our free Nations and Peoples by pretending that our distinct and free nations have been “incorporated” into the ravenous and predacious “body politic” of the American empire.

My maternal great grandfather Solomon Newcomb and my grandpa Bushy Head Spybuck Newcomb both ended up in the militaristic context of what the boys went through at the Haskell Institute. When my grandpa enlisted in the U.S. Army after running away from Haskell, on the first day of boot camp the drill Sargent found out that my Grandpa Busch could already do without error what the new recruits were going to be trained to do.

It is likely that U.S. government officials never dreamed that those of us who are the descendants of boarding school survivors would one day uncover the existence of the U.S. system and code of domination through an intensive investigation of what has happened to our nations and peoples over the centuries.

I fully intend to continue challenging and working to end that bogus and perpetual U.S. claim over our nations and peoples, which is based on a distinction in U.S. law between the “ultimate dominion” of “Christian people” and a mere “occupancy” of “natives, who were heathens” as expressed in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh.

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) is the author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. He is the co-producer of the documentary movie “The doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code (2015), was directed by Sheldon Wolfchild (Dakota). Newcomb is an executive producer of “Oyate Woyaka” (The People Speak), directed by Bryant High Horse and George McAuliffe. It is about efforts to ensure that the Lakota language and culture survive and thrive in the aftermath of the abuses of the Indian Boarding “Schools.” It is scheduled to air on PBS affiliates across the United States during this year’s Native American Heritage Month. Please check out our website originalfreenations.com