It’s our sincere belief that the United States of America is a great force for good in this world. We feed, cloth and minister to the health needs of more people, day in and day out, than most other countries combined.

We always have and likely always will.

None of this means, however, that as a nation we are without warts.

Bad decisions made by bad politicians down through the years have sullied America’s brand with some. It’s one of those bad decisions and a related recent move by the Biden administration that’s at the root of this writing.

President Joe Biden on Dec. 9 designated a national monument at a former federally run Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania to honor the resilience of Indigenous tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions, the Associated Press reported.

During a tribal leaders summit at the White House, the president announced the creation of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument. More than 10,000 children passed through the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School by the time it closed in 1918, including legendary Olympian Jim Thorpe.

They came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that were meant to erase Native American traditions and “civilize” the children so they would better fit into white society.

The children were often taken against the will of their parents, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases, AP noted. Across the country, the forced assimilation policy ended up killing literally hundreds of Native children. Thankfully, it was discontinued in 1978 with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

During a series of public listening sessions on reservations over the past several years hosted by the Interior Department, survivors of the schools recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for using their native languages, AP states.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families’ will, said no single action would adequately address the harms caused by the schools. But she said the administration’s efforts have made a difference and the new monument would allow the American people to learn more about the government’s harmful policies.

We couldn’t agree more.

How the U.S. government dealt with the indigenous populations present was nothing less than awful — not every Indian and not every tribe every time, but as a general proposition.

It’s unclear going forward what can be done, if anything, in terms of remediation.

This Carlisle school memorial, however, seems to be a good first step.