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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday designated a national monument at a former Native American residential school in Pennsylvania to honor the resilience of Native tribes whose young people were forced to attend school and a host of institutions. abusive

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Biden announced the construction of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument while hosting tribal leaders at a summit at the White House.

Thousands of children passed through Carlisle’s celebrated Indian Industrial School when it closed in 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. They came from dozens of tribes subjected to policies of forced assimilation aimed at erasing Native American traditions and “civilizing” children so that they could be better integrated into white society.

READ MORE: Boarding school history ‘a sin on our soul,’ Biden says in historic apology to Native communities

It is the first school of its kind and has become a style for a network of government-supported Native American boarding schools that eventually expanded to at least 37 states.

“Approximately 7,800 young people from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlyle, stolen from their families, tribes and countries of origin. It was a mistake to make the Carlisle Indian School a national model,” Biden said at the White House summit. Don’t delete history. We recognize it, we inform ourselves about it and we will never repeat it again.

Thorpe’s great-grandson, James Thorpe Kossakowski, called Biden’s nomination “historic” and a step toward broadening Americans’ understanding of the federal government’s forced assimilation policy.

“It’s very moving for me to walk around, to take a look at the community where my great-grandfather studied, where he met my great-grandmother, where they got married, where he stayed in his dormitory, where he worked and trained,” said Kossakowski, 54, , of Elburn, Illinois, in an interview.

Children were taken against their parents’ wishes, and about 187 young American Indians and Alaska Natives died at the Carlisle institution, in addition to tuberculosis and other illnesses.

WATCH: Sexual abuse of Native American children in boarding schools revealed in new report

“Designating the former campus of the Carlisle School, with boundaries consistent with the National Historic Landmark, as a national monument will help ensure this shameful chapter of American history is never forgotten or repeated,” Biden said in his proclamation for the monument.

Efforts are underway to repatriate the remains of the children, who were buried at the site, to their country of origin.

“They make up 50 tribal nations from Alaska to New Mexico to New York, and I think that symbolizes how terrible Carlisle was,” said Beth Margaret Wright, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund who has formed tribes seeking to bring back the military. . the remains of his children. and who is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, where there are still young men buried there.

Carlisle was a model for many other schools that came after it and a huge majority of tribal nations that exist today have stories of their children being sent to Carlisle, Wright said.

In September, the remains of three young men who died at Carlisle were exhumed and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

At least 973 young Native Americans died in government-funded boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an investigation by the Department of the Interior.

During a series of public listening sessions in reserves organized in recent years through the Ministry of Interior, school survivors recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair, and punished for their local language.

The policy of forced assimilation officially ended with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But the government never fully investigated the boarding school formula until the Biden administration.

Biden in October apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for the schools and the policies that supported them.

Home Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families’ wishes, said no single measure would adequately address the damage done to schools. But he said the administration’s efforts have made a difference and the new memorial will allow the rest of Americans to be more informed about the government’s destructive policies.

“This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation,” Haaland said in a statement.

Schools, facilities and related assimilation systems were funded by a total of $23. 3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. The religious and personal establishments that ran many schools earned federal money as partners in the assimilation campaign.

Monday’s announcement marks the seventh national monument created by Biden. The 25-acre (10 hectares) will be controlled through the National Park Service and the U. S. Army. It is part of the campus of the U. S. Army War College. U. S.

For Wright, one of the most difficult places at Carlisle’s school is where the traces of the since-deleted exercise tracks that brought the children there were.

“There are no railroad tracks there, but you can see where they might have been and where their children would have first come and noticed such a remote and terrible position,” Wright said.

Native American tribes and conservation teams are pushing for more monuments to be designated before Biden leaves office.

Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

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