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‘Long overdue’: Indigenous people in Minnesota react as Biden apologizes for federal boarding school policy
Indigenous people from Minnesota watched as President Joe Biden apologized for the traumas endured by tens of thousands of children at boarding schools. While some felt the apology was a good first step, others felt it did not go far enough.
Biden spoke in front of a small gathering on the lands of the Gila River Indian Community just south of Phoenix, Ariz.
Biden began his speech by saying the apology for the nation’s role in subjecting children to abuse at boarding schools is one of the most consequential things he’s ever had the opportunity to do as president.
“I have a solemn responsibility to be the first president to formally apologize to the Native peoples, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans,” said Biden.
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“It’s long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make. Federal Indian boarding school policy, the pain it has caused, will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history,” said Biden.
Biden praised the work of Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, who has served in Biden’s cabinet for the past four years, for leading an investigation which documented the experiences of survivors and their families. Biden took a moment to praise the work of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis nonprofit, for its work in creating paths for survivors and their families to heal.
Many Indigenous people from around the state watched the event from home or from work.
Bill Carter, citizen of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Courtesy photo
Bill Carter watched online from his workplace. Carter is a drug and alcohol counselor at the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis and a citizen of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Carter’s aunt Doris Blank is a boarding school survivor. She was taken from her parents to the boarding school in Pipestone at age 12. A story written about Blank just before her 100th birthday last year recalled how Blank and another girl ran from the school. The two girls traveled 400 miles to return home to northern Minnesota.
Carter spent the first part of the day reflecting on his family’s experience.
“My grandfather and grandmother, both of [whom] were based in Grand Portage, made that long trip diagonally across the state down to Pipestone. I don’t think they really had a lot of command of the English language, but they made the trip anyway, because they were desperate to retrieve their children,” said Carter.
“And when they were refused entry, they just set up camp, and they refused to leave until they could join them and were actually given jobs. And they worked within the Pipestone setting.”
Carter said during much of the speech — which he said he thought was a step in the right direction—he reflected on his family’s resilience.
George McCauley, citizen of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, watched the event from home alongside his wife.
McCauley said he felt the apology should have been covered live by more media outlets — feeling as though there just wasn’t enough coverage of the event itself.
He said he was touched by the initial acknowledgement, but said he felt very disappointed by the president’s remarks. McCauley said he felt Biden should have said more about the abuses survivors experienced. McCauley says he believes the apology speech was not the appropriate moment for the president to revisit his administration’s accomplishments in federal Indian law and policy.
“Our relatives were abused. Our relatives were killed,” said McCauley. “Everything that people… I have heard, have witnessed, have felt, and [to] say, ‘We apologize, we apologize.’ That doesn’t sit well with me.”
“We can all apologize for anything, anytime. They’re just words,” said McCauley.
Biden’s visit to Gila River was the first diplomatic trip he’s made to a tribal nation during his presidency. Four years ago, when Biden won his bid for the presidency, he won the state of Arizona— the first democrat to do that since 1996.
McCauley said he is very appreciative of the work done by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and all those working with survivors. McCauley said what he believes is necessary is a healing center for survivors — some of whom have yet to process their experiences.
Emcees Deanna StandingCloud, left, and Deanna Beaulieu warm up the crowd during the 2023 Reclaiming Our IdentitiesTwo Spirit Powwow sponsored by New Native Theatre in Minneapolis.
Erica Dischino for MPR News
Deanna Beaulieu watched the apology at home inside her kitchen alongside her 18-year-old daughter.
Beaulieu works with the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office as a victim advocate. She’s also a child and grandchild of boarding school survivors. Beaulieu said she felt the president’s speech was a good first step.
“I’ve never heard a government official that isn’t a Native person acknowledge what happened to us or what they did to us,” said Beaulieu.
Beaulieu said she appreciated the apology but feels as though the president’s words need to be backed up by action.
She says that includes economic measures, including the return of land, to help make up for the many decades of abuse.
“It’s shameful … and it was done through policy.”
Beaulieu said it will take years of thoughtful public policy to undo the generational harm of boarding school policies. She said she looks to her own family for strength.
“My grandmother and her mother and my mother and now my daughter … we’ve endured. The suffering that we’ve endured can be healed. Doing that healing work — if we heal ourselves, we heal others,” said Beaulieu.
Vanessa GoodThunder stands at bdote, which means the place where two waters meet in Dakota. The Mississippi and Minnesota rivers meet at Fort Snelling.
Jaida Grey Eagle for MPR News
Vanessa Goodthunder watched the speech from her home. She’s a citizen of the Lower Sioux Indian Community near Morton. Goodthunder is the director of C̣aƞṡayapi Waḳaƞyeża Owayawa Oṭi, the Dakota early childhood language school at Lower Sioux.
“Ihuƞ, I am happy to hear there is at least an acknowledgement with the official apology and hopeful for action for efforts to continue to revitalize, protect, and maintain our native languages and cultures,” wrote Goodthunder.
“Now is the time for accountability on the part of the federal government to take those action steps in partnering and supporting these sovereign rights that they tried to eradicate. Waƞnna iyehantu, it’s time.”
Now-former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his primary election night event on June 9 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner officially dropped out of the race July 10 following rape allegations from a former romantic partner that he denies.
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CJ Gunther/Getty Images
Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, is officially out of the race.
The Maine Secretary of State said Platner filed the necessary paperwork to withdraw his candidacy two days after he announced he planned to do so following an accusation of rape by a former romantic partner. Platner denies the allegation.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick Platner’s replacement.
In his withdrawal notice, Platner said “people are desperate for change” and that’s why they voted “for a new kind of politics” by making him the Democratic nominee. He expressed gratitude for those who supported his campaign and said that he will continue to fight for “the movement we have built together and the future we believe in.”
He ended his notice with a strong statement aligned with the progressive platform.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts.”
Platner announced his plan to withdraw from the race in an 11-minute video he posted to social media on July 8. He said he had no choice but to suspend his campaign, citing it was no longer viable financially.
“We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function,” he said.
Platner added that dropping out was not an admission of guilt. Rather, the decision, he said, is to keep the progressive movement in Maine alive to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Platner blamed the “political establishment” for his downfall and argued the goal was to force him out of the race.
“We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change and we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me,” he said.
Many powerful Democrats and progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, urged Platner to step down.
Platner has had to answer to a waterfall of scandals since he launched his Senate bid. Despite those, he ran away with the nomination in the June 9 primary, securing more than 150,000 votes — more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine’s history.
Platner ran on a progressive platform centered on affordability, universal health care and getting corporate money and influence out of politics. During his campaign, he generated an undeniable amount of enthusiasm, something the Maine Democratic Party will have to harness if it hopes to beat Collins in the general election.
Multiple people have already launched campaigns to replace Platner, including former state Sen. Troy Jackson and former CDC official Nirav Shah, who both ran unsuccessful bids for governor.
Platner called on the replacement process to reflect “the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”
“We were asking for real democracy, and we did it the right way. And we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he added.
The Maine Democratic Party said that it intends to hold a new nominating convention where around 600 delegates will select Platner’s successor. Candidates have until July 15 to declare their intent to seek the nomination and gather signatures from at least 8 of Maine’s 16 counties. Party leadership added they will make the nomination process public and transparent.
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”
The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.
It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Reuters contributed reporting
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