WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has created a new national monument on the grounds of a former Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania, which served as the blueprint for hundreds of similar institutions across the United States.
“I want everyone to know,” Biden said. “I don’t want people forgetting, 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now.”
Indian children from 140 tribes were taken from their families, tribes and homelands and forced to spend years at the school in the borough of Carlisle, he noted.
“It was wrong, and by making the Carlisle Indian School a national monument, we make clear that [that’s] what great nations do. We don’t erase history. We acknowledge it. We learn from and we remember, so we never repeat it again.”
Biden told the 2024 Tribal Nations Summit in Washington Monday that the monument will encompass 10 hectares (24.5 acres) inside what is today the Carlisle Army Barracks, including historic buildings and structures that once made up the school’s campus. These will include the brick and marble gateposts at the school’s entrance, which Carlisle students built by hand in 1910.
The U.S. Army will maintain operational control over the site, which is now home to the U.S. Army War College. The Army will collaborate with the National Park Service to oversee the planning and management of the new national monument, consulting with federally recognized tribes to ensure that the monument accurately reflects historic and contemporary impacts of the boarding school system on tribal members and communities.
“This addition to the national park system that recognizes the troubled history of U.S. and Tribal relations is among the giant steps taken in recent years to honor Tribal sovereignty and recognize the ongoing needs of Native communities, repair past damage and make progress toward healing,” said National Park Service Director Chuck Sams, a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Northeast Oregon.
The announcement comes just six weeks after Biden’s visit to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. There, he gave a long-awaited apology to Native Americans for the boarding school era, calling it “one the most consequential things I’ve ever had an opportunity to do in my whole career as president of the United States.”
Earlier Monday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland opened the summit with a speech focusing on the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative she launched in May 2021.
The initiative resulted in a two-volume report that documented the history of the school system, accounting for 417 known schools and confirming more than 900 child deaths.
The initiative also included The Road to Healing, in which Haaland and Assistant Interior Secretary Bryan Newland traveled to 12 Native communities, giving survivors and their descendants an opportunity to share their boarding school experiences.
“So many of you spoke bravely and forthright[ly] … about the horrors you endured or the trauma that was passed down over generations. Those stories must continue to be told,” Haaland told the summit leaders.
As part of the initiative, the Interior Department engaged the National Native Boarding School Healing Coalition to conduct video interviews with boarding school survivors to create a permanent oral history collection.
Haaland announced that the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will partner to preserve their accounts for the public.
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