President Joe Biden is expected to formally apologise on Friday for the country’s role in the Indian boarding school system, which devastated the lives of generations of Indigenous children and their ancestors.

“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” said Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna.

“It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”

Shortly after becoming the first Native American to lead the Interior department, Ms Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system.

Russell Eagle Bear talks to Deb Haaland
Russell Eagle Bear talks to Deb Haaland during a meeting about Native American boarding schools (Matthew Brown/AP)

It found that at least 18,000 children, some as young as four, were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them, in an effort to dispossess their tribal nations of land.

It also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 grave sites associated with the more than 500 schools.

No president has ever formally apologised for the forced removal of Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or any other aspect of the US government’s decimation of Indigenous peoples.

During the second phase of its investigation, the Interior department conducted listening sessions and gathered the testimony of survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgement of and apology for the boarding school era.

Ms Haaland said she took that to Mr Biden, who agreed that it was necessary.

Ms Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend a boarding school, said she was honoured to play a role, along with her staff, in helping make the apology a reality.

She will join Mr Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech. “It will be one of the high points of my entire life,” she said.

It is unclear what, if any, action will follow the apology.

The Department of Interior is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands, and many tribes are still at odds with the US Army Corps of Engineers, which has refused to follow the federal law regulating the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

“President Biden’s apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language,” Mr Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact.”

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating Indigenous peoples and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 was followed by the establishment of a truth and reconciliation process and the injection of billions of dollars into First Nations to deal with the devastation left by the government’s policies.

No such commission exists in the US. A Bill to establish a truth and reconciliation process was introduced last year by Senator Elizabeth Warren, but it remains in the Senate.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

“I am deeply sorry,” Francis said to school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered in Alberta.