Emily Prey
Today is Indigenous Peoples Day in the United States, and U.S. President Joe Biden has become the first president ever to issue a proclamation marking the day. But the United States can do far more. Just as Canada is reckoning with its genocidal history of colonization, so must the United States. This is not only a moral necessity at home but one vital if Washington wants to be a credible opponent of abusive regimes worldwide.
In May, 215 unmarked graves were uncovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. In June, 751 additional graves were discovered near a former residential school in Saskatchewan province. Some of the children were as young as 3 years old. It is believed that between 4,000 and 10,000 children died in such “schools” across Canada.
But forcing Indigenous children to attend residential boarding schools was not a practice exclusive to Canada. The United States has a long and dark history of the same government-sanctioned abuses. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were more than 350 government funded, and often church run, Indigenous boarding schools across the United States.
Fortunately, Biden’s appointment of Deb Haaland to the Interior Department, making her the first Indigenous interior secretary, has paved the way to the U.S. government engaging with this history of colonial abuse for the first time: In June, the department announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive review of the legacy of federal boarding schools.
The department’s own news release announcing the initiative concedes that “the purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities.”
Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children passed through, or died in, these schools between 1869 and the 1970s, until the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 finally allowed Native American parents to legally deny their children’s placement in these schools.
While these kinds of policies were tragically typical of colonial states during the 19th century, they are squarely in contravention of the 1948 Genocide Convention, and thus they meet the standing legal definition of genocide in international law. At least between 1948 to 1978, the United States was not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people.
The 1948 Genocide Convention specifically includes in its definition of genocide the separation of children from families with the intention to destroy the identity of a group, in part or in whole. To the extent to which the boarding schools were specifically designed to “kill the Indian, save the man,” their assimilationist ambitions were explicitly genocidal.
When such policies are enacted in other countries, the United States of today has no difficulty seeing those policies for what they are. The removal of children from their families and their placement into state-run boarding schools was one of the criteria the Biden administration and its predecessor used to correctly identify China’s actions against the native Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide.
The U.S. boarding schools program was specifically intended to erase the Native American identities of children in just the same way that Beijing’s current policies are designed to erase the cultural identities of the Uyghur children they have removed from their parents. Even without considering past atrocities against Native American populations, this crime alone — committed after the United States was a signatory to the Genocide Convention — was a genocidal act under the law. Before 1978, the United States was in violation of the Genocide Convention, just as Beijing is now.
Getting Americans to engage seriously with their own history is a politically fraught task. From the history and legacy of slavery to Confederate monuments, nearly all calls for an objective examination of U.S. history are challenged, most vituperatively by conservatives who prefer the illusion of American perfection to the reality of a country that has often fallen far short of its ideals.
But the price Americans pay for refusing to engage with their past in honesty is steep. Over the past decade, more Americans have begun to engage with their country’s history of slavery and racism, and they are becoming more and more aware of the burdens this still imposes, especially on Black Americans today.
But there has been no similar epiphany when it comes to the legacy of the genocide against Native Americans. Indigenous U.S. citizens remain marginalized, both politically and economically. There have been significant victories for Native American rights and tribal title, and a few casinos and other operations on Native lands have brought economic relief to some, but these have hardly settled the moral score for over four centuries of oppression and erasure, of physical and cultural destruction. Until this history, like the history of slavery, is properly excavated, reflected upon in the public political discourse, and internalized by the general public, Native American citizens will remain marginalized and oppressed.
There is also a steep international price to this failure to recognize U.S. history. America’s dominant place in the world after World War II was predicated on moral leadership. This was not the mere rhetoric of the victor: The reason the United States won the strong network of allies that propelled it to a hegemonic global position after World War II was partly that Washington was seen as a force for good.
But between the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the United States’ failures during the Arab Spring, and the Trump presidency, no other country still believes in America’s moral authority and leadership. Other countries may still respect the United States’ raw military power, but the limits of that have been shown in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without that principled leadership for the world, and without international faith in America’s moral purpose, the country will never again enjoy the alliance of goodwill and just purpose that constituted the “free world.”
When the United States declared the situation in Xinjiang a genocide this year, Beijing retorted with a jab at this very history. When Biden recognized the Armenian genocide, Ankara had the same retort. The Biden administration is correct in its analysis that the only way America’s role in the world, and indeed its national security and global interests, will be protected and enhanced is if the world once again looks to Washington as a force for good and as a moral leader that will defend human rights and international law. But that cannot be done while the United States continues to refuse to exorcise the genocidal demons of its own history. It is too convenient for Americans to criticize others for their crimes against humanity while they themselves refuse to look in the mirror — and everyone else can see right through it.
These first steps from Secretary Haaland are a positive move in the right direction. But the administration overall, and the president in particular, have an opportunity to finally take charge of this issue and open a national conversation on the United States’ fraught history with Indigenous Americans. If handled well, this can finally set to rest so many of the ghosts of history that still haunt us.
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