Protester Interrupts Biden’s Formal Apology to Native Americans

Joseph Biden has issued a formal apology for the Indian boarding school era. In one sweeping statement the outgoing president scrubbed centuries of genocide, a “stain on our nation’s soul,” from its conscience. Biden’s remarks come 530 years after colonization began in earnest—too little too late for some. For others, a reckoning is overdue as an earthquake. While his apology comes across as a gesture of goodwill, Biden’s lack of an actionable plan has many Native communities questioning his sincerity, including mine.

Slippery language

Biden’s address has all the slippery language of Weinstein’s apology wrapped in the theater of a land acknowledgment. The 20-minute speech side-stepped 150 years of lineage-exterminating practices with the same passive excuse as always: America had to happen. Biden, 82, came up at a time when Indigenous peoples received even more scorn than they do today. He became a senator in 1972 at the height of the American Indian Movement. Natives fully earned the right to vote the year Joe Biden turned six. I find it difficult believing someone who vowed to reverse the Dakota Access Pipeline only to allow its continued operation.

The president-incumbent extolled Indigenous peoples for the very values and beliefs his country sought to destroy. As I heard our own history watered down and piped back to us over the mic, I wondered what might’ve happened to Biden’s kids had they been forcibly removed. What kind of brutality would he endure to understand not just the gravity of loss, but apocalypse? He reduces the Native population, whose cultivated lifeworlds all but came to an end, to a small town reeling from a natural disaster. 

“But eventually, the United States was established and began expanding.” 

Not one minute into his speech, President Biden glosses over centuries of murder with a single bloodless sentence, framing genocide as an organic inevitability. Language can use its power to establish a perspective so convincing, you’d think it was your own. It’s how the media inculcates its audience and why they get away with it. Re-read the line about language and power and you know exactly what did the establishing and why. Is that information apparent in Biden’s logic?

Optical illusions

The optics of reporting live from the Desert Southwest, synonymous with Indian Country, should have worked in Biden’s favor. Why didn’t they?

Biden’s apology did not resonate with many Native Americans for more reasons than pandering. All of America is Indian Country, but so much land is missing its original peoples. My nation, the Prairie Band Potawatomi, were forcibly moved to make way for the city of Chicago. Unlike some Tribal nations, the Indigenous people of Arizona live on their ancestral homelands. Northeastern Kansas is not my people’s homeland. Perhaps the hypocrisy of speaking from a reservation like mine versus one situated on ancestral lands would be too obvious because, on the other side of the world, in another desert homeland, another genocide is happening on the president’s watch. 

Native people are watching history rhyme with its worst mistakes. As the death toll in Palestine climbs, emerging parallels between the ongoing invasion and American colonization become undeniable. Meanwhile the United States continues its colonial legacy abroad while its leader offers platitudes for similar crimes perpetrated here. A lone protester said as much when she interrupted the president-incumbent’s speech. 

Biden dodged the protestor’s accusation with the cunning of someone half his age. “Let her go,” he ordered off-camera forces. It’s unclear whether he meant “Let her talk,” or if the woman was apprehended, then released. The president resumed speaking amid a smattering of applause.

The protester’s critique is obvious. Biden cannot apologize in good faith for one genocide while perpetrating another. It is hypocrisy in the highest order. With the protester’s interruption comes a warning. Do not let the systematic destruction of Palestine become another “natural” disaster. This “disaster” is entirely man-made, and violently intentional. 

A response to Biden from the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation

No reason justifies the genocidal founding and expansion of this country, so America made one up. It’s called Manifest Destiny. God ordained the violence, not settlers or armies or presidents, so it’s fine to spill Native blood. It isn’t slaughter, it’s expiation, and the Lord loves a trier. This is why Americans need American exceptionalism. The truth is so appalling that the only way it can be explained back to themselves is through myth. 

My tribe published this response to Biden’s apology in our reservation’s quarterly newsletter:

“Genocide, institutional racism, abuse in all forms, cultural disconnection, alienation and pressure to assimilate away from Native culture and identity have haunted our people for generations, with Native American boarding schools at the epicenter.

“President Joe Biden travelling to Arizona to formally apologize for the federal government’s responsibility, for years of mental, emotional and physical violence intended to eliminate Tribal nations, our language and our culture is a moment in history that gives us hope for the future of Native communities throughout this county—a country that was built on our land and at the expense of our future.

“We cannot deny, however, that it’s impossible to forgive the government for these houses of horror-masked-as-schools that affected generations before us and still affect us to this day as we work through the trauma of it all—but we appreciate today’s historic message and the accountability President Biden carried out on behalf of the United States government.

“We’re still fighting for our freedom, our identity and our land, and the reality is that only when we have greater justice in the ‘land back’ movement will we realize true sovereignty.

“Until that happens, we’ll continue to appreciate and welcome the federal government’s strides towards progress.”