By MATT KELLEY -- The Associated Press (4/28/99)

PHOENIX (AP) -- Canada has apologized for abuses of students in its
system of boarding schools for Indian students. Darlena Watt is angry that
the United States has not done the same.

"We had more boarding schools, more missionary schools, than Canada ever
had," said Watt, a Colville tribal council member who attended the Chilocco
Indian School in Oklahoma in the 1960s. "Whatever happened there, you can
triple it and it was a reality in our schools."

The idea of issuing an apology for boarding school abuses hasn't come up in
Congress, said Senate Indian Affairs Committee spokesman Chris Changery.

In Canada, a flood of lawsuits and a royal commission's report "created an
environment that absolutely demanded that action be taken," said Shawn
Tupper of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.

In the United States, Indians themselves are split over whether an apology
would be a good idea.

Peterson Zah, a former Navajo Nation president who attended the Phoenix
Indian School in the 1950s, said: "The United States owes an apology to the
Indian people that were damaged by the boarding school system so they
ended up alcoholics or total failures."

"What point would an apology be?" countered Claudeen Bates-Arthur, a
Navajo attorney who attended a Methodist boarding school. "It would sound
good. It would make everybody feel better, but sometimes those kinds of
words allow people to say, 'We apologized. Let's get on with things."'

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