LAVEEN VILLAGE, United States (AFP) — President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned, historic apology Friday for one of the United States’ “most horrific chapters”: ripping Native American children from their families and putting them in abusive boarding schools aimed at erasing their culture.

From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity.

A recent government report revealed harrowing instances of physical, mental and sexual abuse, along with the estimated deaths of nearly 1,000 children — with the true figure thought to be considerably higher.

“I formally apologize, as president of the United States, for what we did,” he said in a speech that alternated between fiery and deeply emotional, addressing the Gila River Indian Community in Laveen Village, Arizona.

He added the roughly 150 years the school system existed were one of the “most horrific chapters in American history” and a “sin on our soul.”

“I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” he continued. “Today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”

The apology follows formal declarations in Canada, where thousands of children died at similar boarding schools, and other countries around the world where historic abuses of Indigenous populations are increasingly being recognized.