By P.C. Staff
The Japanese American Citizens League issued a statement in support of President Biden’s Friday visit to Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community, where he apologized for a 150-year-long government policy of separating the children of Indigenous people from their families and putting them in boarding schools, a practice that didn’t end until 1969.
“It’s a sin on our soul,” said Biden, according to the Associated Press. “Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make.”
In its statement, the JACL said it “applauds this historic action by the Biden administration and expresses our hope that this apology serves as just one step towards meaningful and long overdue restorative justice for the many Indigenous communities in the United States.”
The JACL also noted that Arizona was the site of the Gila River War Relocation Authority Center, where during World War II more than 13,000 people of Japanese ancestry were “unconstitutionally incarcerated.” The camp was one of 10 operated by federal government’s WRA.
At the local level, Donna Cheung, Civil Rights chair of the Arizona Chapter of the JACL commented: “From my perspective, a leader who acknowledges and rights a historical wrong reflects a strong, confident nation because such an admission reaffirms the moral centrality of the nation.
“The apology from a sitting U.S. president to First Nation communities is so significant because the U.S. was founded by displacing these communities. The existence of the U.S. is at a profound cost to Native Americans and that needs to be acknowledged also.”
Biden’s Oct. 25 apology echoed 1988’s Civil Liberties Act, when President Reagan signed legislation in which the U.S. government formally apologized to ethnic Japanese — most of whom were U.S. citizens who were forcibly removed from the West Coast and incarcerated in concentration camps — and paid $20,000 to each surviving incarceree.
To read the entire JACL statement, use this link.
To read the Associated Press’ coverage of Biden’s visit to Arizona, use this link.
