Biden’s apology for the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative rings hollow: Nancy Kelsey

CLEVELAND, Ohio - As I write this, I am in tears.

Recently, President Joe Biden apologized for the devastating and traumatic legacy of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in the United States. From the early 1900s until the 1970s, the U.S. employed a policy of forced assimilation on the most vulnerable of Indigenous People — our children.

During Native American Heritage Month, I offer this reflection on the generational impact of forcibly removing children from their homelands — far from the cultures and communities they have always known — and leaving them in the care of strangers, perceived to be superior purely on the basis of white supremacy.

Of the more than 400 such schools in the U.S., two were Mount Pleasant Indian School and Holy Childhood of Jesus Boarding School, both in Michigan, from which my Anishinaabe family comes. The first Nancy Kelsey in my family, my grandmother who died before I was born, attended the former. My father attended the latter.

It's an apology too late. It's an apology my grandmother never got to hear.

Moreover, it is an absolutely meaningless cornucopia of buzzwords and platitudes unless it is accompanied by federal actions to right historical wrongs.

As a direct result of the effects of boarding school traumas inflicted on my father, we will never have the kind of relationship that will permit me to have a candid conversation about his thoughts on the apology.

For me, the effects of boarding schools on my family has hurled us into cyclical traumas my brother and I must actively work to end. My grandmother was orphaned during the influenza epidemic of the early 20th century. She struggled with alcoholism as an adult and — despite what I know must have been her best efforts — my father was removed from her care when he was a child. And so the cycle of Indigenous children being forcibly placed in federal Indian boarding schools continued with my father.

I will never know exactly what my father was subjected to at Holy Childhood, whose name alludes to its Catholic founding. All I know is the little bit of what he has shared with me, but it is not my place to air his traumas. But I will never forget that when I was younger, he said when I am older he would tell me more someday about what happened to him there. My father, I truly believed, tried his best to be a good dad. Sometimes he was present and many times he wasn't. But as an adult, I have come to understand and accept he had no model in his life for how to parent well, because he was torn from his mother's home so young and left in the care of cold and callous nuns. These women were not model Christians, let alone any kind of model for a loving home.

Some of what I know of my grandma and dad's experiences really comes from listening to and reading about others' experiences at Holy Childhood and other Indian boarding schools. There are so many survivor accounts about various abuses and barbarisms at the hands of the people who ran these federally-funded institutions. Even though this occurred before I was born, there is a heart-wrenching pain hearing about how my dad was hurt.

It is truly a tragedy that with each generation of my family, from my grandma's parents to my grandmother to my father and then myself, we have lost so much of our language and culture. Federal Indian boarding schools played a huge role in that loss. To this day, I grieve the loss of my ancestors' knowledge and feel guilty for not knowing more.

Still, in this loss — and in President Biden's apology — lies an opportunity to make change.

I am glad Biden chose Deb Haaland, a Native woman, as secretary of the Department of the Interior, under which the Bureau of Indian Affairs falls. Her appointment no doubt yielded this long-overdue apology. But I am still feeling a bit cynical about it.

This gesture came toward the end of the Biden administration. I worry that with the new administration, notoriously riddled with deep-seated xenophobia, none of the Biden administration's plans will ever come to fruition. However, I hope I am wrong.

The Kelseys are just one of several Indigenous families in Cleveland that have the stories of their own boarding school - or residential school, as they were called in Canada - weaved into their family histories.

It has taken me a while to process these complicated feelings in a cohesive way to articulate them in this column. It will take me a while still to fully understand what this apology means and it might take the span of my lifetime to process my generational grief.