U.S. Apologizes a Century After Alaska Bombings and for Years of Kidnapping Native Americans
Official apologies can never wipe away the results of government-sanctioned atrocities, but they do bring the issues to public attention and sometimes public action.
Some apologies literally take centuries, others come more quickly, and some governments never take responsibility for acts of destruction. The timing of apologies may have to do with a change in politics and the political points scored by apologizing. Sometimes they are delayed for many years until there has been a change in the political climate and the victims have died. Or they may come through the emergence of leaders who have a real sense of shame and feel a genuine need for officials apologies. And often apologies are triggered by longstanding lobbying by descendants of the government violence.
Officials may avoid apologies in fear that any action may lead to costly reparations. This did not concern the Netherlands Prime Miniser Mark Rutte when in December 2022, he apologized on behalf of the Dutch Government for its role in slavery. He also pledged to give 200 million euros towards “raising awareness, fostering engagement and addressing the present-day effects of slavery.”
England was far ahead of the time with the passage of the Slave Compensation Act 1837 which distributed around 20 million pounds in compensation in over 40,000 awards for enslaved people freed in the colonies of the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope.
In the U.S., lawmakers have apologized for slavery but have balked at providing the billions in reparations sought by slavery’s descendants. The late, former Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., reintroduced his bill, “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act”, every year from 1989 until his resignation in 2017. The bill has consistently failed although reparations have been initiated in some U.S. cities.
In recent days, the U.S. issued two rare apologies for wrongful historical incidents, including Navy attacks on natives in Alaska and the government’s involvement in the forced relocation of native American children to American boarding schools.
Last week, the U.S. apologized for the October 1882 bombardment and destruction of an Alaska village by the U.S. Navy, that led to widespread suffering and “inflicted intergenerational trauma.” The Navy officially apologized for wrongful military action involving Tlingit natives whose village in Angoon, Alaska, was destroyed by U.S. Naval forces. Angoon is about 100 miles south of the state capital of Juneau. About 420 people lived in the village.
“The Navy recognizes the pain and suffering inflicted upon the Tlingit people, and we acknowledge these wrongful actions resulted in the loss of life, the loss of resources, the loss of culture, and created and inflicted intergenerational trauma on these clans,” Rear Adm. Mark B. Sucato said in a ceremony on Saturday. “The Navy takes the significance of this action very, very seriously and knows an apology is long overdue.”
The attack on Angoon was one of a series of conflicts between the American military and Alaska natives in the years after the U.S. bought the territory from the Russia empire in 1867 for $7.2 million in 1867, equivalent to $129 million in 2023
Last month, the U.S. apologized for destroying the nearby village of Kake in 1869, and the Army plans also to apologize for shelling Wrangell, also in southeast Alaska.
The U.S. attacks at Angoon stemmed from the accidental death of Til’tlein, a Tlingit shaman who was killed when a harpoon gun exploded on the whaling ship where the shaman was working. The ship was owned by the North West Trading Company which was organized in 1879 by Paul Schulze and Henry Villard in order to do business in Alaska. They established a trading post at Killisnoo in 1878 that soon grew to include a fish processing plant at the same site, the first one of its kind in the developing Alaska Territory for nearly 40 years.
After the shaman’s death, Tlingit villagers allegedly took two white hostages and demanded compensation as part of their indigenous lore in the form of 200 blankets from the North West Trading Company. The company’s superintendent then called on the Navy to help, saying a Tlingit uprising threatened the lives and property of white residents.
Commander Edgar C. Merriman led a naval expedition to rescue the hostages and upon his arrival, the Tlingits released the hostages. Merriman then demanded 400 blankets from the Tlingits as a “punishment and guarantee of future good behavior” to be delivered by noon the next day.
When the Tlingit delivered just 81 blankets, Merriman’s forces attacked. Under the cover of the bombardment, marines arrived and destroyed homes, chopped up and destroyed 40 canoes, and demolished food stores. Most of the inhabitants survived after fleeing the village but six children died of smoke inhalation. An unknown number of Tlingit died during the following winter because their winter supplies, canoes and shelter had been destroyed.
An anthropologist, Frederica de Laguna, examined the matter in 1949 and found that the villagers were not warned of the coming of the American ship and that every structure was destroyed. Tlingit oral tradition also disputes that there were white hostages involved.
Reactions to the bombardment led to the passage of the First Organic Act of 1884 which transferred Alaska from military to civilian control. The act allowed Alaska to become a judicial and civil district with judges, clerks, marshals, and limited government officials appointed by the federal government to run the territory.
Alaska was a vital American possession in part because from 1869 to 1910, hundreds of thousands of prospectors ventured to Alaska in search of gold. The gold rush led to the growth of fishing, trapping, mining, and mineral production and the depletion of Alaska’s resources.
After the U.S. bought Alaska, the Army served as the civil administering entity until 1879 when the Navy took over.
U.S. authorities cited common law in treatment of the native population but the Tlingit people abided by indigenous law. Americans saw the Tlingit legal framework as based on “revenge” but it actually involved complex “peace ceremonies” which included compensation in either goods or human lives.
In 1973, the Indian Claims Commission awarded the Angoon clans $90,000 in compensation for property destroyed. The village of Angoon accepted the settlement as a tacit acknowledgment that the Navy was wrong to shell Angoon. Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond declared the 100th anniversary as “Tlingit Remembrance Day.”
In 1869, in addition to the attacks at Angoon, the U.S. and Tlingits fought in two major conflicts following retribution killings by the Tlingit against whites.
In the February 1869 Kake War, the U.S. obliterated three deserted villages and two forts near present-day Kake, Alaska. The attack came after Kakes killed two white trappers in retribution for the death of two Kake who were leaving the Sitka village in a canoe.
In December 1869, the U.S. bombed the Stikine village of Old Wrangell. The assault came after the U.S. demanded the villagers turn over a Stikine named Scutd-doo following the retribution murder of Leon Smith by Scutd-doo. Scutd-doo’s son, Lowan, had earlier been killed by soldiers.
The Navy bombed for two days and the Stikines returned musket fire before they handed Scutd-doo over to the army, The captive native was court-martialed and hanged before Stikine villagers in the first application of the death penalty since Alaska came under U.S. rule.
Boarding Schools
On Friday, Oct. 25, President Biden issued a formal presidential apology to the Native American community for atrocities committed against indigenous peoples during the era of federal Indian boarding schools.
From 1819 through the 1970s, the federal government established and supported Indian boarding schools throughout the country. The goal was to assimilate Alaska Native, American Indian and Native Hawaiian children into White American culture by forcibly kidnapping them from their families, communities and belief systems. Many children who attended the boarding schools endured emotional and physical abuse, and some died. The U.S. ran more than 400 such schools during a period of 150 years.
Following Biden’s election, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a Native American, and her department began the first-ever federal investigation into the Indian boarding school system and completed a “Road to Healing” tour to hear from survivors of the boarding schools.
“For more than a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children, as young as 4 years old, were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government and religious institutions,” Haaland said. “This includes my own family. For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books. But now, our administration’s work will ensure that no one will ever forget.”
Lakota People’s Law Project Director Chase Iron Eyes said the government apology was an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, “but it is not any form of redress. An apology is just the beginning of a necessary truth-telling. An apology is a nice start, but it is not a true reckoning, nor is it a sufficient remedy for the long history of colonial violence.”
Biden has worked to repair relations with Native American communities. He championed the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions of dollars for infrastructure investments in native communities.
Then-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008 for Canada’s “residential schools” program, which involved kidnapping First Nations children and raising them in government schools.
“The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history. … The government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry,” said Harper.
The apologies were stark reminders of the many American acts of barbarity that have inflicted untold deaths that have yet to be addressed in any official government action.
They included but are not limited to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed as many as 200,000 people. In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. Both American and Japanese officials made it plain that Obama would not issue a formal apology for the bombings.
Other catastrophes that drew no official apologies were the U.S. role in the Vietnam War and the deaths of estimated 2 million civilians. In 2009, Second Lt. William Calley apologized for his role in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, when soldiers murdered at least 347 and up to 504 civilians in the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. Almost all the victims were women, children, and elderly men. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12. The incident was the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.
Calley, the platoon leader, was found guilty of premeditated murder of 102 civilians. He was sentenced to life and was paroled in September 1974 by the Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. … I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry,” said Calley.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq claimed the lives of as many as 204,000 civilians in a war based on the lie that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. In 2008, President George W. Bush addressed the Iraq invasion but only said that he “regret[ted]” the “intelligence failure in Iraq.”
In 1988, Bush’s father, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, said, “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”
Another catastrophe which has not garnered apologies was the combined U.S. Air Force and RAF firebombing of the German city of Dresden on Feb. 13–15, 1945, in which an estimated 100,000 civilians were incinerated. The Allies said Dresden was a justified strategic target, because of its major rail transport and communication facilities, which housed 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort.
Critics of the bombing argued that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to military gains. Some claimed that the raid was a war crime.
Throughout its history, the U.S. has officially apologized and admitted it had done wrong just a handful of times, including:
Klaus Barbie
During Germany’s occupation of France in World War II, Klaus Barbi, a high ranking Gestapo officer known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” was responsible for overseeing the murder and torture of French Jews and members of the French Resistance, as well as deporting thousands of Jews and noncombatants to concentration camps. When the war ended, Barbie escaped from Germany and fled to Italy, then to Bolivia in 1951.
In 1983, the U.S. investigated French charges that the U.S. had shielded Barbie after the war. The U.S. Justice Department confirmed the claims that Barbie had been protected by several high-ranking members of the U.S. Army during the post-war occupation of Germany. The investigation found that the Army had been using Barbie as a paid informant during the last few years of the war and helped him escape to Bolivia. In 1983, Barbie was extradited to France to face trial for war crimes and later that year, the U.S. issued a formal apology for hiding him.
Barbie was indicted in 1984 for crimes committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon between 1942 and 1944. He was convicted on July 4, 1987, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in Lyon of leukemia, and spine and prostate cancer at the age of 77.
Japanese-American Imprisonments
After the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt approved a plan to imprison Japanese-American citizens in camps across the U.S. During World War II, 120,000 Japanese-Americans and permanent residents were forced to abandon their homes and belongings to live under guard at the camps. Roosevelt approved the internments because of widespread racist fears that Japanese born Americans were disloyal.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford revoked Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 and said the internment of Japanese Americans was “wrong.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered every interned person an apology and $20,000 in compensation.
Hawaiian Coup
In January 1893, a group of American-born businessmen and sugar magnates staged a coup against the Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani, with a goal of taking total control of the lucrative sugar plantations. With support from U.S. Marines, the insurgents forced the Queen to abdicate. The coup’s backers declared the country a new Republic, but their real goal was to be annexed by the U.S. In 1898, Hawaii was formally annexed by the U.S. and administered as a territory until 1959. In 1993, the Congress issued a joint resolution formally apologizing to the people of Hawaii for the U.S. government’s role in the coup.
The Tuskegee Experiment
During World War II, government scientists began working with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama on a long-term study on hundreds of black men to learn about the long-term progression of syphilis. The men were not informed that they were subjects of a study, and were not given the medical treatments that doctors told them they were receiving. In exchange for their unknowing participation, 399 black men living with syphilis were instead given meals, free medical exams, and free burial services after their deaths.
The study continued for 40 years, long after the discovery of penicillin and other medical treatments for syphilis. The experiment was uncovered by an investigation by the Associated Press in 1972, resulting in a $10 million settlement with the surviving subjects. President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the unethical experiments in 1997.
Slavery and the Jim Crow laws
In 2008, the House of Representatives issued a formal apology for 246 years of slavery and disenfranchisement under Jim Crow laws. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn, issued the apology and drew a parallel with the government’s apology for interning Japanese citizens and later pressuring Japan to apologize for forcing Chinese women to work as sex slaves during World War II. The American government, Cohen said, had never formally recognized and apologized for slavery. The apology did not provide reparations for the evils of slavery.
It took more than 40 years before the city of Greensboro, N.C., formally apologized for city police taking no action in a deadly Nov. 3, 1979, attack by Ku Klux Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party. Five people were killed after the KKK and Nazi sympathizers attacked an anti-KKK march.
Rwanda Genocide
In 1998, President Bill Clinton apologized for the failure of the United States to do more to prevent the Rwandan genocide, which resulted in the death of 800,000 people in just 100 days. Clinton apologized to the Rwandan community on behalf of the United States. In 1999, Clinton also apologized for U.S.-backing of right-wing governments in Guatemala that killed tens of thousands of rebels and Mayan Indians in a 36-year civil war.
Native Americans
In September, 2000, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Gover extended a “formal apology to Indian people for the historical conduct of [the Bureau of Indian Affairs],” including policies of ethnic cleansing and cultural annihilation inflicted upon American Indian and Alaska Native people in the United States.
The apology did not specifically address the so-called “Trail of Tears,” the forced displacement of around 60,000 people of the “Five Civilized Tribes” between 1830 and 1850. During the relocation, the Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. The Trail of Tears has been called an example of the genocide of Native Americans and ethnic cleansing.
A Senate resolution over treatment of Native Americans did not apologize on behalf of the government but rather apologized “on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native peoples by citizens of the United States.”
Forced Sterilization
On May 2, 2002, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner apologized for practices of forced sterilization affecting 8,000 people, marking the first time a U.S. governor formally apologized for a eugenics policy. Starting in 2015, the Virginia legislature agreed to pay $25,000 each to all living victims.
In December 2002, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber apologized for the 60-year-period of forced sterilization that affected more than 2,600 Oregonians. In 2003, South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges apologized to the estimated 250 victims and their families for practices of forced sterilization as part of the eugenics movement. And in 2003, California Gov. Gray Davis apologized for forcible sterilization practices between 1909 and 1960s.
“The eugenics movement was a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved,” Warner said in offering the “commonwealth’s sincere apology.”
Warner spoke on the 75th anniversary of a Supreme Court decision that upheld the state’s 1924 eugenics statute. The practice of eugenics was adopted by 30 states and resulted in the involuntary sterilization of an estimated 65,000 Americans. Most of the procedures predated World War II and were intended to prevent those considered genetically “unfit” from passing on their traits to future generations. The number of sterilizations in Virginia was exceeded only by California, which sterilized about 20,000 people. The American eugenics movement became something of a model for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Foreign Apologies
Other nations have apologized for their destructive actions but some still deny responsibility.
On June 3, 2020, King Philippe of Belgium issued the first ever public apology to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) over Belgium’s brutal and decades-long colonial administration. The apology came 60 years after the DRC’s independence and 112 years after Belgium first colonized the territory then known only as the Congo.
In 1995, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui apologized for the massacre of thousands of civilians during the White Terror, an aborted insurgency, almost 50 years after the incident. In 2016 Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen apologized to Taiwan’s indigenous communities for centuries of state-instituted mistreatment and discrimination.
In January 2021, Ireland apologized for the pain caused by the so-called “mother and child homes,” where unwed women and girls were sent to give birth, experimented on in unethical vaccine trials, physically and psychologically mistreated, and then pressured to give up their newborns for adoption.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized in 2008 for the nation’s treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The apology marked the possibility of new policies for recognition and fairer treatment for indigenous communities.
In 1996, South Africa’s Frederik W. deKlerk apologized for the “pain and suffering caused by the disgraced system of racial separation” 46 years after the end of apartheid. De Klerk, the former South African president and minister of education, denied responsibility for the many abuses that were part of apartheid, including assassinations, torture, and other human rights abuses.
In 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt memorialized his “‘silent apology” on behalf of Germany for the many Jews imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis at a Warsaw ghetto.
In 1988, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney issued an apology to Japanese Canadians for their treatment during World War II.
In 1988, former South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan apologized for abuses committed during his 8-year tenure, including the massive corruption and the government suppression of a revolt in the southwest province Gwangju, which killed hundreds of civilians.
In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin apologized to South Korea for the downing of a Korean Air Lines jet with 269 people aboard. In 1993, Yeltsin apologized for the internment of 600,000 Japanese POWs after World War II, calling their treatment “inhuman.”
In 1995, Lithuanian President Algirdas Brazauskas apologized to Israel for Lithuania’s role in supporting the Nazi Holocaust. Also in 1995, French President Jacques Chirac apologized for the role France played in deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II.
The same year, Queen Elizabeth II signed the Waikato-Tainui Raupatu Claims Settlement Bill offering a royal apology to Tainui Maori tribal confederation for land the British colonial government seized in the mid-19th century. In addition to the formal apology, the settlement included the return of land and cash payments, totaling $170 million.
In 2007, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for Britain’s role in the slave trade.
In 2014, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin apologized for the Kfar Kessem massacre in which Israeli border police shot and killed 49 Arab Israelis including men, women, and children. Rivlin described the massacre as a “an irregular and dark chapter in the history of the relationship between Arabs and Jews living here.”
The Vatican has apologized for numerous acts, including:
Pope John Paul II was responsible for a number of apologies. On August 14, 1985, he issued an apology for the involvement of the Catholic Church in the slave trade. In 1995, the Pope apologized for the role the Catholic Church played in the oppression of women both in the Church and in society as a whole. In 1998, Pope John Paul II apologized for the inaction of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. In 2000, he issued a broad apology for the errors of the Church committed over the past 2,000 years, including “[r]eligious intolerance and injustice toward Jews, women, indigenous peoples, immigrants, the poor and the unborn.”
In 2018, Pope Francis apologized for the failure of the Catholic Church to protect the thousands of children who were sexually abused by “predator priests” in Pennsylvania.
Some leaders have shown remorse but stopped short of apologizing. In 2019, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May refused to apologize but instead expressed “deep regret” for the 1919 Amritsar massacre, when at least 379 Indians were massacred by British colonial troops in the Pujabi city of Amritsar. On April 13,1919, a crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, a public garden, including families having picnics and people protesting about the deportation of a pair of nationalist leaders. Brig Gen George Dyer, the officer in charge of the city, lined his men up against a wall of the enclosed garden and they started firing without warning on the crowd for up to 10 minutes, stopping only when they had run out of ammunition.
Armenian Genocide
The Turkish Republic has consistently refused to acknowledge the systematic genocide of 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1923, both during and after the First World War.
The Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of present-day Turkey, feared the Armenians allegiance to Russia in world War I and sought to annihilate the Armenian population, either through murder or deportation in death marches across the Syrian desert.
The Turkish Republic, founded after the defeat of the Ottoman Christians, denies there was a genocide. The Turkish government still considers the Ottoman Armenians to be traitors who collaborated with the Russians. The official position is that Armenians and Turks died in a civil war and not a genocide.
As of 2023, the governments and parliaments of 34 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, and the United States, have formally recognized the Armenian genocide. Three countries — Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Pakistan — deny that there was an Armenian genocide.
The border between Turkey and Armenia remains closed. The two countries have failed to establish diplomatic relations despite the fact that at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkey recognized the independent country of Armenia.
The Japanese government has issued vague statements that do not address its role or the crimes committed in World War II.
There has been no apology in Russia or even an acknowledgement of one of the worst catastrophes of the 20th century, known in Ukraine as simply the “Holdomor.” From 1932 to 1933, an estimated 8 million people died of hunger in the Soviet Union, including about 4 million people in Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of Europe. In the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, in the North Caucasus, on the Volga and in Western Siberia, more than 2 million people died of hunger.
The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his regime deliberately caused the famines and subsequent deaths of millions through its government collectivization. Russia later pretended the atrocity had never taken place. To this day, the Russian regime denies any responsibility for the famine, which the German parliament recognized as a genocide on November 30, 2022.