Monday marks the last time President Joe Biden will host leaders from across Indian Country at the White House for the Tribal Nations Summit. Then-President Barack Obama began this annual tradition in 2009.
“I get it. I’m on your side. I understand what it means to be an outsider,” Obama said. “I know what it means to feel ignored and forgotten, so you will not be forgotten as long as I’m in this White House.”
Then Donald Trump got elected and ceased hosting it.
Biden brought the summit back in 2022. Even though President-elect Trump returns to the Oval Office next month, Assistant Interior Secretary Bryan Newland insisted Biden’s administration still has a lot of work to do.
“It shows that the job’s not finished,” Newland told KJZZ News. “You know, the president was elected to serve four years, not three years and 10 months. So we are still hard at work, as we will be all the way up until January 20th.”
That includes Biden naming a new, nearly 25-acre national monument commemorating the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, while building on his formal boarding school apology that he delivered in Arizona.
In 1879, this institution opened its doors and closed in 1918 after subjecting some 7,800 Native children from more than 140 tribes to horrific abuses in an attempt to assimilate them.
The Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument is the 432nd site part of the National Park System. This presidential proclamation to preserve the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks is the twelfth time Biden has utilized the Antiquities Act.
Throughout his term, he’s made several designations of significance to Indigenous communities, including Avi Kw Ame in Nevada, Castner Range in Texas, Berryessa Snow Mountain and San Gabriel Mountains in California as well as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon.
In a statement, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland sought to lean on the National Park Service as “America’s storyteller” to help educate the public about the nation’s 150-year boarding school era and “the intergenerational impacts of these policies as we, as a nation, continue to take steps to heal from them.”
During the summit, the Biden administration also unveiled its 10-year national plan to revitalize Native languages that were lost, in part, by the federal Indian boarding school agenda.
When asked if Trump will keep the summit going this time around amid his second term, Newland answered: “Well, there’s always a chance for everyone to do better tomorrow.”
