How Biden’s Indigenous boarding school apology could impact the Native vote
Al Jazeera
The Democratic president issued a historic apology for a system that sought to erase Indigenous culture. But will it mobilise Native voters?
Rosalyn LaPier still shudders when she thinks of the abandoned, windowless Victorian manor that sat next to a tiny chapel on the Montana reservation where she grew up.
Some weekends, as a child, LaPier would pass by the gloomy estate on her way to a local cemetery to pay respects to deceased relatives. Along the way, her grandparents would tell stories of the atrocities they endured and witnessed inside the foreboding property.
“Think Addams Family. Think death,” LaPier, an environmental historian and lecturer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Al Jazeera. “Fear is the way people thought of those places.”
The spooky building was a former Catholic boarding school for Indigenous children, part of a web of similar institutions across the United States where Native culture was actively suppressed — often with violence and abuse.
LaPier said that the decrepit wooden edifice had haunted generations in her family and community.
