Mary Annette Pember
ICT
The advancements made in the United States in recent years to officially face up to its ugly Indian boarding school history are being walked back under President Donald Trump.
The Trump administration announced in April that at least $1.6 million in funding had been slashed for projects meant to capture and digitize the stories of systemic abuse of generations of Indigenous children in government-run boarding schools.
Now questions are being raised about the removal of details from the White House website of President Joe Biden’s historic apology for Indian boarding schools and his proclamation a few weeks later that the former site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a national monument.
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Both announcements have been scrubbed from the website, which responds to links with an “404 error” message. The Carlisle proclamation appears to have been moved to a government web page described as “Biden White House Archives.”
“This is historical material ‘frozen in time,’” according to a statement at the top of the archived page with Biden’s Carlisle proclamation. “The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.”
Other statements suggest some of the measures may have been rescinded by the Trump administration. An archived statement posted by outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Jan. 6, 2025, includes links to the apology and the Carlisle proclamation, with a warning note at the top.
“You are viewing ARCHIVED content published online before January 20, 2025. Please note that this content is NOT UPDATED, and links may not work,” the notice states. “Additionally, any previously issued diversity, equity, inclusion or gender-elated guidance on this webpage should be considered rescinded.”
ICT’s requests for comment received no response from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nor from press representatives from the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service and the Office of Army Cemeteries.
‘A sin on our soul’
The U.S. made great strides toward officially facing its Indian boarding school history during Biden’s years in office, including a year-long Federal Indian Boarding School initiative launched by then-Interior Secretary Haaland, who is Laguna Pueblo and a descendent of boarding school survivors.
As part of the initiative, Haaland traveled across the country on a “Road to Healing” tour that gathered testimony from survivors and their families. The initiative also began the process of documenting the thousands of Indigenous students who were forced from their families and taken to boarding schools, which sought to wipe out Native people, culture and language.
The Department of the Interior released two Indian boarding school investigative reports in 2022 and 2024. The final report included a series of recommendations for the government, starting with an apology.
Biden issued the historic apology at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona on Oct. 25, 2024, in an emotional speech that brought tears to many in the crowd, describing federal Indian boarding school policies as “a sin on our soul.”
“I formally apologize today as President of the United States of America for what we did,” he said. “I apologize, apologize, apologize!”
As first reported in The New York Times on May 1, the link to Biden’s apology has been deleted from the White House website. Biden’s apology could not be found on other government websites, either, although a chronological slide show of his presidency in the archives includes one photo of the event.
Biden followed up the apology with a proclamation in December 2024 designating the Carlisle Indian Industrial School site as a national monument. Although the proclamation is no longer on the White House website, an archived version remains and a description of the monument — which would be the 432nd site in the national park system — remains on the National Park Service website.
Biden proclaimed the Pennsylvania school site a national monument under the Antiquities Act, which authorizes the president to declare, at his discretion, historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest, as national monuments, safeguarding them from harm.
According to Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, about half of the country’s national parks were first protected under the Antiquities Act, and they note that no court has ever overturned a president’s monument designation.
Earthjustice leadership says that nothing in the Antiquities Act authorizes the president to remove lands from a national monument, but the Yale Journal on Regulation published an opinion earlier this year that a general discretionary revocation power exists for the president that authorizes him to reverse the designation.
According to the National Park Service, not all of the national monuments proclaimed by presidents over the past century are still national monuments. Eleven have been abolished by acts of Congress. Some of the designations were removed because resources for which the monument was originally established diminished or were determined to be of less significance, or because of mismanagement or other problems.
‘Start with the truth’
Questions remain whether the advances made in recent years for Indigenous people will last through the latest Trump administration.
A string of federal layoffs cut off resources in the Indian Health Service, the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education, and other agencies that impact tribal communities. Tribal colleges and universities also faced cuts.
Some of the cuts were rescinded by the Trump administration or by judicial orders, but reports continue to surface about problems accessing funds that should still be available.
In April, the Trump administration announced the reduction of $1.6 million for the boarding school digitizing project. The cuts to the digitization project were among a string of grants canceled by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition lost more than $282,000, halting its work to digitize boarding school records. Also terminated was a $30,000 grant for a project between the Koahnic Broadcast Corporation and Alaska Native Heritage Center to record and broadcast oral histories of elders in Alaska.
NABS and the other grant recipients received identical letters saying the grants “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities,” signed by Michael McDonald, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“If we’re looking to ‘Make America Great Again,’ then I think it should start with the truth about the true American history,” said Deborah Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
This article contains material from The Associated Press.
This story has been updated with a statement from the National Park Service.
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