-September 30 marked the National Day of Remembrance for U.S.

Indian boarding schools.

In the 1800s, the federal government and churches began operating those boarding schools as a way to assimilate Indigenous children into white culture.

As a result, Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

You're looking at photos from the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada.

At these schools, several children died from disease and abuse.

A federal investigation has confirmed at least 973 deaths.

On the National Day of Remembrance, local tribal organizations held a ceremony, which a Nevada Week team attended.

We heard from one of the organizers and then a firsthand account from a woman taken to a boarding school as a child.

(Little Cat) I wish people would understand that this was like a century-long traumatic event; that it's like everlasting; that it affects our future generations, myself included; how it affected our great-grandparents, our grandparents, and parents and how they raised us and how our culture assimilated and how it affects us today in the sense of I don't speak my language.

I remember my mom's friend was telling me how, when my mom shared the news of having us, my siblings and I, and she was saying that she never wants to teach us Navajo because she was bullied and punished for speaking the language.

So to this day, I don't.

I only know certain words.

(Yvonne Hawk Verjan) I just remember my grandmother would go to work, my aunt Jenelle would go to work.

I was taken care of by one of my aunts.

I don't know what happened by that time.

I just know this lady came and got me, took me somewhere.

I end up in New Mexico at a boarding school.

I didn't, I didn't-- At that time, I wasn't thinking about anything because I'm a young kid, you know?

I just remember my hair getting cut.

I had this funny looking dress on, and I see all these people, these ladies, you know, dressed in different kind of uniforms and all that.

I just, all I remember bits and pieces.

I just remember she's taking me down the stairs into the basement.

I see all these beds laying all around.

It was a real cold, cold, eerie feeling I had.

I didn't want to go.

I had no choice.

And then that night we slept, I slept on the floor.

I could hear all the kids crying.

I just remember us lining up the next morning against a wall.

We all had to stand there like, you know, like that.

And then we end up having chores to do.

And some of them didn't do it right.

They get taken to a room, get punished.

Next thing I know my grandmother came and got me out of there.

Bits and pieces I remembered, but it's not a good feeling.

It was like scary.

-In Nevada, the Interior Department has identified three federal Indian boarding schools.

The only one located off a reservation was the Stewart Indian School in Carson City.

By 1919, it housed more than 400 students.

It closed in 1980 and now serves as a cultural center and museum dedicated to telling the stories of the students who lived there.

Since 2017, the Army has worked to return the remains of children buried at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

That was the nation's first off-reservation boarding school.

Last month, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal, the remains of Della Tuscarora Atkins, a Shoshone girl from Nevada who died at Carlisle at 17, were brought home to the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Northern Nevada, more than 2,000 miles away and 126 years after her death.