‘Pure Hell’: The Painful Legacy of Boarding Schools for Native Americans.

President Biden apologized on Friday for the abuses children experienced at the government-run schools, which were designed to erase tribal ties and cultural practices.

Ron Singer, who is 67 and a member of the Navajo Nation, called it three years of “pure hell.” At age 7, he was sent to a Native American boarding school run by the federal government in Tuba City, Ariz., more than 40 miles from his home.

“It was like a prison setting,” he said, with 40 boys confined to a dormitory at night and made to march around the school like soldiers by day. Children who misbehaved were told to pull down their pants and then beaten, Mr. Singer said.

“I can still feel the hurt,” he said.

President Biden formally apologized on Friday for the abuses that generations of Native American children suffered at the schools, calling the mistreatment “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.”

For more than 150 years, from the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the federal government removed thousands of Native American children from their homes and sent them to hundreds of boarding schools across the country.

The schools were designed to erase the children’s tribal ties and cultural practices. Children were given new names, forcibly converted to Christianity and punished for speaking their Native languages. Many were physically and sexually abused.

A report released in July by the Interior Department identified by name nearly 19,000 children who attended the schools between 1819 and 1969, though it acknowledged that there were more. At least 973 children died at the schools and were buried at 74 sites, 21 of which were unmarked, the report said.

Congress funded the schools through annual appropriations and by selling land held by tribes. The government also hired Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Congregationalist associations to run schools, regardless of whether they had experience in education.

The federal government spent about $23 billion in 2023 dollars on the system, according to the Interior Department, operating 417 institutions in 37 states and territories. To coerce parents to send their children to the schools, Congress authorized the Interior Department to withhold guaranteed food rations to families who resisted.

“The policy was to get them away from their homes, their culture, their language, their families and their spirituality and totally assimilate them into white ways,” said Denise Lajimodiere, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and a founder of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. “It was forced Christianity.”

Because the first school opened in 1801, they can seem part of the sepia-toned past. But survivors like Mr. Singer — now in their 60s, 70s and 80s — can still vividly recall the abuses they experienced.

Mr. Singer said the dormitory attendants at his school would hit the boys with a brush. Children who made noise at night had to line up and were hit three times, he said. Mr. Singer said that he was once forced to pull down his pants in front of other children in the bathroom, told to bend over and then beaten.

“It was all negative, and I’m still reeling from the emotional impact,” he said.

Ms. Lajimodiere’s parents and grandparents were sent to the schools. At her father’s school in Oregon, which he was sent to when he was 9, the teachers “weaponized food,” telling him that he would not eat if he didn’t go to church, she said.

They put lye soap in his mouth if he didn’t speak in English, she said. And they subjected him to a punishment called “the gantlet,” where children had to line up behind him and take turns whipping him with a belt.

“The legacy is still that trauma, intergenerational trauma,” she said.

One of the most infamous schools, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa., was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, a military officer who fought in the Red River War, a campaign in the 1870s to forcibly remove the Comanche, Kiowa and other tribes from the Southern Plains.

Children who arrived at the Carlisle School were photographed and then stripped of their tribal clothing and hairstyles. Then they were photographed again, with boys in uniforms, and girls in Victorian-style dresses. The photos were evidence of Mr. Pratt’s mission, which he made clear in a proclamation: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Many Native Americans say the schools led to a decline in the use of Native languages and alienated them from their families and tribal communities. Ms. Lajimodiere said that survivors had struggled with addiction and suicidal feelings.

But ultimately, the federal government failed to destroy Native American cultures and traditions because “we persevered,” Deb Haaland, the interior secretary and a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, said on Friday at an event at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, where Mr. Biden issued his formal apology.

“In spite of everything that has happened,” Ms. Haaland said, “we are still here.”

Ms. Lajimodiere said that Mr. Biden’s apology — he called the schools “a sin on our soul” — was meaningful for some Native Americans but not for others who attended the institutions.

“It validates what happened to us that the government recognized what they did to us,” she said. “And for me, that’s a huge step toward healing. Others have said: ‘I don’t care about an apology. I’ll never get my childhood back.’”