WILLIAM BRANGHAM: We return now to a dark chapter in U.S. history.

More than 3,000 Native American children died in the custody of the U.S. government after they were forced to attend so-called Indian boarding schools.

That's according to a new investigation by The Washington Post.

That is three times the number of lives lost that the government documented in its own investigation released earlier this year, and the real death toll could be much higher.

We are joined now by The Washington Post's Dana Hedgpeth.

She's one of the lead reporters on this series and is also an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina.

Dana, welcome back to the "News Hour."

DANA HEDGPETH, The Washington Post: Thank you.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The U.S. government from the 1800s to the 1960s ran these schools.

Can you remind us why the government set these schools up in the first place and the kinds of children that ended up there?

DANA HEDGPETH: Absolutely.

Thank you so much for having me.

Let's step back for a minute and think about the time of when these schools were set up.

It was at a time in the 1800s.

They were created by the U.S. government and run in partnership with churches, religious groups, with one goal, to take children from their home, either forcibly or coerce them from their homes, in the name of assimilating them into white society.

And that was the purpose of them.

The idea was to take the children away from their communities and strip them of their language, their culture, their ways, their customs, and, again, to keep them into assimilation.

Many of these children were -- to call them schools, as one of our sources said, they really weren't schools.

They were really work camps.

Children spent half the day in school learning basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the other half really in workshops, fields, manual labor.

The idea was not to train them to be doctors or lawyers or accountants, but rather to be doing manual labor jobs.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And as your reporting shows, there was also another motive, that if you stripped Native culture from these children, maybe they would be more and their families might be more compliant to give up their lands, to settlers, et cetera.

DANA HEDGPETH: That's right.

Remember, at the time that this policy was implemented, this was the end of the Indian Wars.

Gone were the buffalo for many tribes in the West.

They had been pushed to reservations at this point, Native Americans had.

And so you're talking about, as Brenda Child, a Native American historian, says, probably one of the lowest points in Native American culture in life.

Then to come and take their children, it gives me shudders, because, for any culture, any people in the world, when you go after their children, you are really talking about trying to break a people.

The U.S. government had decided that the Indian Wars were too expensive at this point, and that it was actually cheaper to -- quote, unquote -- "educate" Native American children, rather than to try to fight them.

And this was all in the name of a land grab.

During this time period, Native Americans lost over a billion acres of land,again, pushed to reservations.

They were wards of the state, of the federal government.

They were not able to go freely.

Everything was run through an agent of their reservation.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: As I mentioned, there's this incredible discrepancy in the number of children whose lives were lost in your reporting compared to what the U.S. Department of Interior put out in its findings earlier this summer.

How do you explain that discrepancy?

DANA HEDGPETH: Very good question, and thank you for asking.

The federal government for the first time under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who's the first Native American Cabinet secretary appointed to that position, was the first person to ever step back, take a really hard look and scrutinize her department, the very department that implemented this policy and carried it out.That's a huge step.

And kudos to her department for during that.

They worked incredibly hard for three years, and they had a lot of findings that really turned the spotlight on themselves.

They looked exclusively at federal records, solely at those.

It was limited in scope, and they admitted that, that it was an undercount.

They found 973 children died during a 150-year period at these schools.

We built upon that work and, along with hundreds of thousands of records from the National Archives, from researchers around the country who had done the work, and we brought all that together to give the most complete accounting that's really been done to date looking at the systematic effort of 400 schools across the country to wipe out Native Americans' culture.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I use the language of these children died in these schools, and I feel like that's almost a little bit of a sterile way of describing it.

Can you talk a little bit about the conditions that these children endured and how they came to the end of their lives?

DANA HEDGPETH: You're absolutely right.

These conditions were horrific.

There were two government reports done, one by the Meriam Report, government-commissioned report, in the 1920s that called these substandard.

They were grossly inadequate.

To call them in education, again, is not even fair.

The children were mistreated.

They were severely punished, whipped, beaten, starved of food.

We found dozens of children who, sadly, died trying to run away from these schools.

A young Navajo boy froze as he was trying to run away from the school.

Children died of suicide.

We found indications of abuse that likely led to students' death.

These are not the schools that your children or my children in modern times would be subjected to.

They really were not.

And as a very wise woman from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation said to me, what schools have cemeteries?

I mean, just sit with that, right?

Schools shouldn't have cemeteries.

And so many of these schools, sadly, did.

We found 881 students who were buried, died and buried on their school grounds.

Again, that is so very, very wrong.

This was a systematic policy to try to eradicate a people.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Your reporting shows how many, many of these children are still buried on the sites of these former schools.

And you tell the story of Almeda Heavy Hair, one young woman whose -- her family's attempt to bring her remains home.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

DANA HEDGPETH: Yes.

Almeda was part of a group of 22 students that came in 1890 from the Fort Belknap Reservation.

And we were invited and honored to go on the journey to see 19 of her tribal members go to Carlisle, watch her remains, sadly, be exhumed, and then travel with them the 2,000 miles back to Montana, where she reburied on her tribal homeland.

It was a very powerful and emotional trip, lots of mixed emotions, bringing out the past.

But she really symbolized, sadly, the loss of culture and of language that so many people felt over generations.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Dana Hedgpeth, this is such a tremendous piece of reporting you have done and your colleagues at The Washington Post.

Thank you so much.

DANA HEDGPETH: Thank you for having me.