A Call for U.S. Apology

Canada has apologized for abuses of students in its system of boarding schools for Indian students. Darlena Watt is angry that the United States has not done the same.

“We had more boarding schools . . . than Canada ever had,” said Watt, a Colville tribal council member who attended the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma in the 1960s. “Whatever happened there, you can triple it and it was a reality in our schools.”

The idea of issuing an apology for boarding school abuses hasn’t come up in Congress, said Senate Indian Affairs Committee spokesman Chris Changery.

Indians themselves are split over whether an apology would be a good idea.

Peterson Zah, a former Navajo Nation president who attended the Phoenix Indian School in the 1950s, said: “The United States owes an apology to the Indian people that were damaged by the boarding school system.”

“What point would an apology be?” countered Claudeen Bates-Arthur, a Navajo attorney who attended a Methodist boarding school. “ . . . Sometimes those kinds of words allow people to say, ‘We apologized. Let’s get on with things.’ ”