WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will designate a national monument Monday that will memorialize the federal government’s oppression of thousands of Native American children in a boarding school system during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Biden will announce the new monument, called the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument and located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the final White House Tribal Nations Summit of his administration this afternoon.
The school was founded in 1879 and was the first federal off-reservation boarding school for Native children, serving as a model for more similar schools across the country that ultimately numbered more than 400, according to the White House. The school operated for nearly 40 years.
The White House said that for more than 150 years, the federal government separated children from their families, removing them from American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities “often by force or coercion,” and “transported them to institutions that aimed to strip them of their languages, religions, and cultures.”
The federal government sought to assimilate these children by denying them use of their native languages, religions and cultures.
“To that end, the children taken to these institutions were often separated from their families for years, and many never returned to their homes,” according to the White House proclamation for the monument. “Many Native children were subjected to sexual abuse at the schools. School staff cut their hair, made them give up their traditional clothes and names, provided them with inadequate medical services, and deprived them of essential nutrition.”
Available records show that nearly 1,000 of these children died in this system, but the death toll is believed to be much higher, the proclamation says.
At the Carlisle School specifically, children were forced to perform harsh labor by building facilities on its campus as well as the entry gates that remain standing today, the White House said in the proclamation and related release.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who is attending the summit and is the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, is a descendant of survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system.
The Carlisle School and national monument will be located on 24.5 acres of what is now the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks, which the White House said is one of the oldest military installations in the U.S. The National Park Service and Army will help manage the monument.
The designation follows Biden’s formal apology in October for the boarding school system during a visit to Phoenix, Arizona. The administration first announced in 2021 that it would investigate the federal government’s past oversight of the policy.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
