Biden dons tribal blanket, announces plan to ‘revive’ Native American languages

A teary-eyed administration official solemnly draped a tribal blanket over President Biden on Monday before he announced plans to “revive” Native American languages and designate a Pennsylvania Indian boarding school as a national monument. 

Biden, 82, joked that the embroidered, eighth-generation Native American blanket, gifted to him by an emotional Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, would’ve come in useful last week when he battled frigid temperatures and gusty winds at the White House National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony. 

“I could’ve used that blanket when I was lighting that Christmas tree,” the president said. “Both of us were freezing.” 

Images of a bundled-up Biden at the Christmas tree lighting drew comparisons to Ebenezer Scrooge and other Dickensian characters on social media, with many users mocking his unkept and ghostly appearance. 

The president’s address Monday, at his fourth and final White House Tribal Nations Summit, was mercifully indoors. 

In his remarks, Biden announced a new proclamation designating the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School — where more than 7,800 children from 140 Indian tribes were separated from their communities between 1879 and 1918 — a national monument. 

“I don’t want people forgetting 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now, pretending it didn’t happen,” the president said of the government effort to Westernize Native Americans. 

The children sent to the repurposed Carlisle, Pa., Army barracks were “stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands,” Biden said.

“It was wrong,” he declared. 

“We don’t erase history. We acknowledge it, we learn from it and we remember so we never repeat it again,” Biden added. “We remember so we can heal. That’s the purpose of memory.”

The new national monument will encompass 24.5 acres of historic buildings and structures that made up the old campus of the Carlisle School. 

It will be managed by the National Park Service and the US Army, the White House said. 

The president lamented that Indian boarding schools all but erased the culture and language of Native American tribes and said the US would embark on a “10-year plan to revive Native languages in a serious effort.”

“It’s a vision that works with tribes and supports teachers, schools, communities, organizations in order to save Native language from disappearing,” Biden said. “This matters. It’s part of our heritage It’s part of who we are as a nation.”

The “all-of-government strategy” to preserve and revitalize Native languages will expand access to immersion language programs in schools, support community-led language education efforts, and promote Native language schools and programs, according to the White House. 

The Biden-Harris administration has spent $45 billion Native American interests since 2021. 

Biden’s announcements follow his October apology on behalf of the federal government for the historical policy of forcing Native American children into assimilation-focused boarding schools.