Last week’s apology from the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was a long time coming. Nonetheless, it was a welcome and apparently sincere gesture. Let us hope it was also a harbinger of better administration of the agency.

In a speech Friday before a crowd of 300 agency employees, federal officials and tribal members, BIA boss Kevin Gover officially apologized for the bureau’s "legacy of racism and inhumanity." The occasion was the agency’s 175th anniversary – a period of time that left Gover with plenty for which to apologize.

In his statement Gover acknowledged the BIA’s role in "the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and cowardly killing of women and children." He called it a "tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life."

Moreover, he said the BIA, "participated in the ethnic cleansing that befell the western tribes." That included the elimination of tribal governments and the infamous boarding schools where Indian children were stripped of their ancestral languages, customs and religion.

Gover, a Pawnee, made it clear that he was speaking for the bureau, not the entire federal government. His speech, however, was vetted by White House officials before he delivered it and there were no objections.

That makes this as close as a national apology as Indians have ever received. In that context, Gover’s statement should be seen as a good first step.

The United States must accept responsibility for what it did, even long ago. It is more important, however, for it to make right what wrongs it can.

That those misdeeds are not limited to 19th century crimes is evidenced by the agency’s notorious mismanagement of the trust accounts it oversees for both individual Indians and tribes. In congressional hearings held in 1999, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt admitted that those accounts had been improperly handled for decades and that the agency’s record-keeping was in disarray. How those, more modern, transgressions are addressed will have more impact on Indians today than any admission of century-old guilt.