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[ man singing in Native American language ] WOMAN: This is David Hill.

He is my grandma's great-great-grandfather.

You can see everybody that went to boarding schools, three generations.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: I feel like the boarding-school era kind of crushed a lot of our people here, beating them for speaking their own language or singing their songs.

Oh, my God, it was hell.

I got bad memories about them times.

We have a lot of evidence that a lot of the children died.

MAN: It had to be hugely brutal in order for kids to be dying in school.

WOMAN: They were buried in the town cemetery in a regular grave plot.

WOMAN: If this were to happen to any other group, it would be viewed as a crime scene.

The federal government took these children with intention and purpose so they could stomp out everything that was Native American in them.

And the irony is all it did was plant seeds of resistance that made us want to come back stronger.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ children chattering ] Lahunx, which animal would you like?

Gewcis.

Gewcis.

Everyone wants gewcis.

Thank you.

We're trying to bring back the Klamath language.

We're just trying to bring back the language and the approaches in everyday use.

We're gonna make puzzles with animals.

NARRATOR: For the Klamath people, their traditional language ties them to their land, ancestors and historic culture.

But this indigenous language, like hundreds of others across the continent, was nearly lost.

KOOTSIE: You can cut 'em into strips.

CHILD: Okay.

KOOTSIE: Yeah, just look at your picture.

So we're teaching the colors and then the name of the animals.

So instead of introducing the English word, we do the Klamath word.

Look at the letters.

Did the letters match where it spells gewcis?

We've got some good workers here.

Teacher... For generations, government schools punished children for practicing their culture or speaking their traditional language.

[ singing in Native American language ] WOMAN: They weren't allowed to speak our language.

They were essentially punished for being who they were.

And so that's why it's important for us to use it here because they weren't allowed to.

[ ♪♪♪ ] From 1819 right up until the 1970s, the federal government removed Native American children from their homes... tens of thousands of boys... and girls... preschoolers... to teenagers from tribes across the country grew up in boarding schools.

WOMAN: Children need families, because that provides a sense of security and love, and that was missing for generation after generation of Native children.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Children lived together in dormitories under the control and supervision of white teachers and church officials, often for years.

It was part of a larger government effort to eradicate traditional Native culture and assimilate tribes into mainstream society.

MAN: And they wanted to do so because of this misplaced notion of civilization.

To "civilize" at that time meant eliminate, uh, their culture and make them Christians.

Children faced harsh punishment for breaking the rules.

Beatings, withholding food and solitary confinement were regularly used.

ABBY: My grandma was a fluent language speaker of the Klamath language and didn't teach it to any of her kids or grandkids.

What happened in her experiences at two boarding schools that she would not pass that language on to her children and grandchildren?

[ ♪♪♪ ] Abby Hall is an enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes.

She has spent years trying to uncover her extended family's history in boarding schools.

I feel it's important to acknowledge the truth and how bad it truly was so that Native people today can accurately acknowledge how strong our ancestors were and how resilient they were.

David Hill is my grandma's great-great-grandfather.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In the 1870s, Abby's ancestor, David Hill, was a Klamath leader when the government began forcing the community's children into residential schools.

ABBY: Early on, they would intentionally go after the children of leadership, such as the children of chiefs or headmen, so that they could then use them against their parents to gain compliance.

And all the writing in red are the different boarding schools that people attended generation after generation.

This is just my family line, and you can see how many people attended boarding schools.

And every Native family is similar.

[ crowd cheering ] Today, there are 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.

ALL: Hi!

The Klamath Tribes is small with just over 5,000 members.

ANNOUNCER [ over PA ]: It's Klamath, Modoc and Paiute.

You guys look beautiful.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ people chattering, cheering ] [ announcer speaking indistinctly, crowd cheering ] [ indistinct conversations ] It officially formed with the Treaty of 1864, bringing the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Paiute people together onto one reservation in Southern Oregon.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Oral history and modern science agree that their homelands include some of the oldest known inhabited sites in North America.

But like indigenous people across the country, their lives changed when European and American explorers and settlers brought disease and conflicts.

There's a huge vacuum of information in our society about Native people that has been suppressed, I think intentionally suppressed for generations.

ABBY: I volunteered to help write a lesson on Klamath tribal boarding school experience.

And what I found was a complete void of records.

The government's records are scattered through archives, churches and private collections, making research difficult or sometimes impossible.

What I honestly thought when I started this research project was I would be able to go online and find a list from the federal government of all the Klamath tribal members who attended boarding school.

No such list exists.

I'm trying to build up that list of our tribal members.

And so if you would be willing to give me whatever you know, "This is their names, this is where they went."

We made one from scratch, running around with a clipboard asking people their family history.

But I'm so glad you came.

I really liked what you and your family did, um, at the Tribal Council a couple weeks ago.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

So I didn't know that stuff.

Yeah.

Abby gives presentations like this one both to share her findings and learn from the community.

Indian children were six times as likely to die in childhood while at boarding schools than any other children in America, and still, they persisted with the boarding schools for hundreds of years.

And our Klamath children did not fare well in the boarding schools.

Oh, my God.

It was hell.

DAVID: Some of those people never returned.

The way they went about disciplining kids for stepping out of line was really, truly brutal.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: Yeah, I just turned 5.

Five days later, I think, they put me on that damn train.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I don't call it school.

I call it a concentration camp.

That's what I always called it.

MAN: One thing about dad, he really didn't talk about it a lot.

He just said it was, uh, you know, a hard life.

My mother and father never shared any of those things with us.

The number one thing I've heard in my own family and other people's families is they didn't talk about it.

There are relatively few recorded testimonies of students' experiences.

What does exist provides powerful insight into what children endured.

Talk Indian, they were punished and they had thongs tied around their thumbs, and then their toes just barely touched the floor.

And they'd stand there for hours like that.

INTERVIEWER: For talking Indian?

For talking Indian.

They tried to get us in trouble for every little thing, if we try to sing Indian song or talk Indian.

And I was-- They had to make me stand in corner two or three times for talking Indian.

MAN: Dad, he was up there from time he was 5 till he was 12.

They had a tough life.

Never being able to celebrate, never being able to speak the language.

And, you know-- And that's, you know, and that's a shame because, uh, you know, I'd like to speak, you know, now, but I-- I really only know a few words.

INTERVIEWER: Is the heritage being lost?

Well, it-- Yeah, it started way before my time and it's really stressed in schools.

And a lot of other Indians want to know what our heritage really was, our culture.

And we're trying to find ways to... to learn it.

[ all singing in Native American language ] MAN: I feel like the boarding-school era kind of crushed a lot of our people here, especially with the whole language thing, you know, breaking them, breaking them and beating 'em for speaking their own language or singing their songs.

And so that's a lot of the stories that I heard from a lot of our-- A lot of my elders that have passed on is, you know, they always said, you know, "We wish we could remember those songs."

But a lot of 'em said they got 'em beat out of 'em.

My dad went to boarding school, and his family, they were all separated in different states.

They only knew a few words.

So... And wanting to know that side of my family and not having that information, you know, showed me how important it is to be teaching these children their language.

What was the purpose of boarding schools?

Was it to assimilate?

Which means to divide, to defeat, to take control over, to change and have authority over.

But you can't do it if you don't separate.

That's why they didn't get to go to the same schools.

That's why they were sent all over, so they couldn't have attachment with their family, to separate that spirit from the elders to the children, from the siblings to the siblings.

That gave me the goose bumps thinking about that, because it's a painful thing.

[ ♪♪♪ ] This boarding-school philosophy goes all the way back to, you know, Benjamin Franklin saying, "Take these children and raise them up."

It went back to the 1600s of taking Native children away from their families and raising them up within the dominant society's religion.

Christian missionaries operated some of the first Native American boarding schools.

In 1819, the Indian Civilization Fund Act gave money to churches and other groups to convert Native Americans to Christianity through education.

Methodist preacher Jason Lee headed west into Oregon country in the early 1830s and soon opened a school in what is now Willamette Mission State Park.

So a number of children were brought to the school, and they were given, you know, white-sounding names.

They were gi-- They were taught English, and there was some sort of epidemic.

Many of the students died, and they closed down the school.

Today, Willamette University and other nearby buildings in Salem, Oregon, cover the remains of one of Lee's schools, dating back to the 1840s.

[ ♪♪♪ ] We're excavating to find the foundations of the Indian Manual Labor Training School.

WOMAN: Wow.

Yeah.

MAN: It's called a rubble wall.

MAN: Yeah.

MAN: It's basically two planks with, uh-- with fill-in between the two planks.

This guy... now... The children, as the name in this school sounds, had to do labor.

So we're uncovering evidence that many of the students, uh, helped to construct the school.

The hidden remains of abandoned and forgotten boarding schools exist all over the country.

The majority have never been studied.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ mumbling indistinctly ] I just kind of... push.

Let it roll.

I think the hospital was over in that far corner.

This was the government headquarters.

This is all that's left of the Klamath Agency.

Beginning in the 1860s, a government-appointed agent lived and worked on the reservation.

Agents acted as liaisons between the tribe and Washington, D.C.

By the mid-1800s, the government had forced most Native Americans onto reservations, and many had their own boarding schools, sometimes run by a church.

DAVID: Native people on reservations were not citizens.

Just signing a treaty didn't make you a citizen.

Because of that, the government basically had really free rein to force their kids to go to school.

If parents didn't send their children to school, the government could punish the entire tribe by withholding food or other basic necessities.

There was coercion at the highest level.

There is a story of some Hopi leaders who refused to send their children to boarding schools and they were jailed in Alcatraz.

So it wasn't a matter of, "You have a choice to send your kids or not."

The children would fight back, they would run away.

At the Klamath Indian Agency, the girls actually set the dormitory on fire.

The on-reservation boarding schools were seen as not quite as effective from the viewpoint of the school administrators, because if your parents live just 2 miles or 10 miles outside the school, well, you could easily run away.

[ ♪♪♪ ] United States Army general and Civil War veteran Richard Henry Pratt devised a plan that would change Indian educational policy for decades and have long-lasting impacts for tribes across the country.

He coined the term "racism," believing that Native Americans could only survive by assimilating into white culture and claiming their place as American citizens.

[ man as Pratt reads on-screen text ] In 1879, Pratt pushed for a military-style boarding school located far away from reservations and students' families.

DAVID: And they figured out that if they made a larger school with only a few administrators and then teachers, they could save money by concentrating all those students into one location rather than five or ten reservations.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania, modeled after a program Pratt used on Native American prisoners of war.

The superintendent would write down their name, their tribe, their agency and the date that they had arrived.

And that was part of this bureaucracy and enumeration that was absolutely part of the intake process.

DAVID: Well, it was very militarized.

They had to dress a certain part... act a certain way, all speak the same language, cut their hair.

Life was regimented to the minute, with morning bugle calls and military drills, only part of the day focused on academics.

The off-reservation boarding schools were initially supposed to be industrial and agricultural training schools where the children that attended them could learn to be farmers and wagon makers and kind of have a more or less education.

They were supposed to learn to speak English.

Ideally, they were supposed to be Christianized, but effectively, they were supposed to become workers, and this was their worker training.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The Dawes Act of 1887 aimed to turn Native Americans into farmers.

It allowed the U.S.

government to break up tribally controlled lands to create individual plots, but most of the land was not suitable for farming.

Surplus land was then sold to non-Natives, amounting to 90 million acres lost.

The theft of Indian lands paid for the theft of Indian children.

So they stole the land under the Dawes Allotment Act, and then they sold those allotments to non-tribal members.

They then took that money to pay for the boarding schools in which they stole the children.

So the theft of Indian lands paid for the theft of Indian children.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The Carlisle Indian Industrial School still stands as part of the U.S.

Army War College.

From 1879 to 1918, more than 10,000 Native American children from over 140 tribal nations attended school here.

Pratt had hundreds of propaganda before-and-after photographs printed and sold as souvenirs.

The images showed students when they first arrived at school, still wearing their traditional clothes, and then again months later.

So the two photos were intended to show how the school was successfully assimilating children from tribes that were not acculturated.

Pratt wrote to tribal agents, encouraging them to send children from their reservations.

At first, some tribes agreed.

And so when somebody comes to the reservation and says, "Hey, look, we will take your children.

We will teach them English.

We will teach them how to read and write.

We'll teach them a trade.

They will be fed and clothed, and when they come back to you... they will be ready to make a good living."

That was a message I think that was probably really attractive to a lot of parents, not knowing all the other bad things that would be happening.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In the spring of 1900, Reverend Jesse Kirk of the Klamath Tribes accompanied a group of nine students across the country to Carlisle, including his sons, Selden and Clayton Kirk, and their cousin, Joe Ball.

ABBY: I actually was able to go into the Carlisle Archive, and I found a letter from Henry Pratt.

They did not make a very good impression on him.

[ man as Pratt reading on-screen text ] ABBY: Here he is writing to Klamath Agency, writing about my family members and keeping tabs on them.

It makes me happy that, um... That they made Pratt's life a little bit difficult.

[ steam train chugging ] Within months, Joe Ball and Clayton Kirk ran away, getting nearly 200 miles before being captured and returned to the school.

[ ♪♪♪ ] They are missing Canyonville Bible Academy, St.

Mary's Academy, Mount Vernon Academy, Mount Angel... Tribes across the country hold events like this Day of Remembrance Conference to honor and learn more about the students who attended boarding schools.

This is my, uh, great-grandpa.

His name is Joseph S. Ball.

He ran away and then he met my great-grandma over there in Phoenix.

I wanna say he ran away twice.

Just really proud of, like, who they are and where they come from.

So, um, yeah, I love him.

Joe ran again, and on his official transcript from Carlisle, it says "deserter," and those sorts of things give you pride, knowing that even the children were fighting back against this system.

At Jesse Kirk's insistence, the brothers were removed from Carlisle.

Clayton would later be awarded a scholarship to Yale.

Both would be longtime leaders for the Klamath people, with Selden earning the title Klamath Chairman for Life.

But Selden's children were also forced into boarding schools.

Selden had a son named Raymond who was sent to Chemawa, and he contracted tuberculosis out there and died at the age of 15.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Charles Hood arrived at Carlisle in 1885 at the age of 17.

He married fellow student Lucinda Clinton and settled on the Klamath Reservation as a rancher.

His daughters Tina, Rosa and Mabel also ended up in Carlisle, some of Abby's distant relatives.

This is a picture of Mabel Hood, and she was born in 1895 and she attended Carlisle in 1905.

And what we know is that she was sent home with tuberculosis.

Mabel was put on a train from Pennsylvania.

And so I can't imagine how this young lady felt on that train ride, but I have to imagine she felt all alone.

The Oregon Journal reported Mabel was alone at the Portland train station.

Sick with tuberculosis, she refused to eat or talk.

Her father saw the article and rushed to retrieve her.

And it's always important to remember they're not just numbers.

They're somebody's daughter or somebody's sister.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In 1880, the federal government opened the second off-reservation boarding school in Forest Grove, Oregon, with 14 boys and four girls from the Puyallup Tribe of Washington State.

EVA: Almost everyone who came in that first class were older.

They were actually-- A lot of them were like 18 to 25.

And then they built the other dormitory and the workshop and the furniture for the school.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The students worked under school founder Army Captain Melvin Wilkinson.

In 1878, he led an unprovoked slaughter of Indian civilians at a village along the Columbia River.

A year later, he was appointed as a military instructor at Pacific University.

This is like a small portion of the photographs that we have.

Eva Guggemos is the archivist at Pacific University, which once owned the land housing the Forest Grove Indian Industrial School.

She says the first child to die at Forest Grove was Martha Lott, who arrived in 1881.

She is probably standing in the back of this image.

Martha was the Spokane chief's daughter.

Within months, Martha disappears from a photograph of the same students.

And because of the political prominence of her father, we know a lot more about what happened to her than we do for most students at the school.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ men singing in Native American language ] [ indistinct conversation ] [ drums beating rapidly and singing continues ] Pacific University's Indigenous Student Alliance now hosts reconciliation events to honor the students of the Forest Grove Indian School and the children who died there.

The students planned this first ever prayer walk from the university to Martha Lott's grave site.

EVA: The Indian School was not here on our campus.

It was on land that Pacific owned about four blocks that way.

Thank you everyone for bearing with the rain.

[ people singing in Native American language ] The area is right over here.

[ singing continues ] [ singing stops ] So I've tried very carefully to document every student death at the Forest Grove Indian School.

I've been able to find evidence of 11 children dying in school custody.

There were more than that who were sent home sick and likely died soon after being sent home.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In the spring of 1885, 19 Klamath students arrived at the Forest Grove School, including the 17-year-old daughter of Abby's ancestor, Chief David Hill.

She is likely one of these young women.

ABBY: So David Hill, his whole next generation went to boarding school.

And at that time, the Forest Grove Indian School was in a period of transition.

But basically they came during a time that was really probably one of the most stressful times to arrive in Forest Grove.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Part of the school had burned down, and a decision was made to move to a new location about 40 miles south in what was effectively unwanted swampland.

And then they were taking students and moving them to Salem, to the new campus, which had no buildings yet, and just putting them off the side of the railroad tracks.

They'd have one outhouse for the boys and one outhouse for the girls and no bathing facilities.

It was a beastly circumstance, and they had 200 kids there.

In the rainy spring season, students had been brought in to build the new school from the ground up.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The new facility would eventually be known as the Chemawa Indian Industrial School.

The idea of these schools was that the children would work half-time and they would go to school half-time.

That was the selling part when they were taken from these reservations.

This was not the case when they first moved to Salem.

They moved to Salem and they were effectively indentured servants.

Within months, two Klamath students went home sick, including Abby's great-great aunt, Lena Hill.

She had tuberculosis, and then we don't know what happened.

Other documents show that at least six of the original group of Klamath students died within a year of arriving.

Many children were buried at the school cemetery.

In the 1960s, the overgrown grounds were bulldozed.

Fortunately, a map had been made of the cemetery prior to its demolition.

I might have to weigh these down, but... We took the original map and cross-checked every one of the names and dates against the enrollment files and against whatever death records we did have.

And so I'd made up a sheet to this effect, and we found all kinds of errors.

We were able to see where there were large empty areas, which suggests that there probably were graves there.

Researchers found that 270 children died while at Chemawa, often from tuberculosis.

To die without your family, to die alone, that's just excruciating.

There's... There's no other way to put it.

[ ♪♪♪ ] ABBY: And so I'm scanning the list, and a lot of them had died of tuberculosis and those sorts of things.

And I see a name, Charlie Fiester, Klamath, age 12, cause of death: gunshot wound.

How does a kid get shot at boarding school?

Charlie Fiester was enrolled in Chemawa on May 12th, 1905.

He was 10 years old.

Within days, he ran away, making it 100 miles south before being captured.

There is little information about his time at Chemawa, but in 1907, he tried again, breaking into a post office in search of food.

In the dark of night, the on-site postmaster shot at the intruder, killing Charlie.

I was immediately angry.

Angry at the institution that was so bad that a 12-year-old kid had run away three times.

Charlie never made it home.

He remains at the Chemawa Cemetery.

There's deaths and there's other abuses, a lot of other abuses that went on into the present era.

My mom went to boarding school up in Chemawa.

Uh, I seen the scars, big old scars around her back.

They beat her with a rubber hose.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Children seen as troublemakers ended up in reform schools.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: After proper medical recommendation, the child is committed to Fairview.

Or sometimes even places like this, the state's so-called feeble-minded school.

Records show that five siblings from one Klamath family were sent here and sterilized.

The youngest was a 10-year-old girl.

They were sterilizing Native American women in the boarding school here and-- Up into the 1970s.

And so there's a whole generation of kids who are never born because they sterilized a good number of women in the boarding schools.

Some organizations are trying to help researchers find answers.

We have a large collection of Chemawa materials from the Chemawa Boarding School, mostly their yearbooks and their weekly publications.

The State of Oregon Library is part of a project to digitize Native American records and make them available to the public.

It allows access globally.

Otherwise, these are behind locked doors.

You don't normally have access to these materials and it's difficult to see them.

Additionally, it allows people to communicate with family members, maybe have some tough conversations about what happened.

They might be able to search for names and say, "Hey, I didn't realize Grandma or Grandpa was in a boarding school.

Can we talk about that?"

[ ♪♪♪ ] What are we doing with this?

Write his name.

It's gonna go like, I'm gonna put "Jim" and then "Morrison."

Yeah.

And there's gonna be a lizard right here in the middle.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Today, Chemawa remains the oldest school of its kind in the country, one of just four government-funded Native American boarding schools still in operation.

Chemawa is fun.

It has its challenges and it has its days, but I like being here.

For some students, the boarding schools offered a positive experience, providing an education they couldn't get at home.

[ laughs ] My great-grandfather became a blacksmith.

He learned his blacksmithing skills at the boarding school in Grand Ronde.

So some people, some families did take to it well.

With hundreds of schools across the country, some were better than others.

Resources and staffing could make a difference.

There is no question, there were some of the staff and the teachers that had good hearts and wanted nothing but the best for the kids.

If you look at the employee list, you'll see that some of the graduates remained because they wanted to stay and assure that these children would succeed and survive.

Benjamin Lawver of the Klamath and Modoc tribes spent years working with Chemawa students.

In 1959, he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers and went on to coach at boarding schools.

[ whistle blows ] [ ♪♪♪ ] DAVID: Most students got involved in some of the organized sports like football, baseball, basketball, track and boxing.

[ whistle blows ] There were actually women's basketball teams at places like Chemawa when other schools didn't have them.

[ woman singing in Native American language ] The discovery for me of Reuben Sanders was pretty amazing.

He was an amazing athlete.

He would win at track-and-field events.

He would win at football.

He won at baseball.

He would really-- He's really good at basketball.

He made holes-in-one in golf.

He would make his own bows and arrows and fishing reels.

There wasn't anything he wasn't good at.

[ all cheering ] [ whistle blows ] What began in the boarding schools has become an important part of Native American communities.

[ crowd cheering ] Indian basketball tournaments draw big crowds with quick-moving games and competitive players.

[ players chattering ] And just because our people went through these things, that doesn't mean that it has to stop you from being the best person that you can be.

ANNOUNCER: And now, fans, we'd ask that you please rise and remove your hats and welcome recording artist and singer from the Klamath Tribes... At the Portland Trail Blazers game, I was asked to sing the national anthem for the inaugural Native American Heritage Month celebration.

♪ Oh, say, can you see ♪ ♪ By the dawn's early light ♪ ♪ What so proudly... ♪ Rebecca Kirk's family members attended boarding schools but encouraged her to break the cycle.

Why I wanted to go to boarding school when I was a teenager was because, honestly, I didn't know better.

Instead, Rebecca entered a leadership academy and became a successful artist and business owner.

The desire to learn about her heritage began at 7, when she started entering Native American pageants.

I was able to start learning more about my culture, traveling to different communities, powwows and parades, and, um, learning more about who I am as a Native person.

[ man singing softly in Native American language ] Henry Rondeau calls himself a cultural revivalist, working to learn and share Klamath heritage with the next generation.

You know, I never really got to grow up in a traditional family like that, so a lot of it's still-- Still new to me.

Good morning, everyone.

How are all my little relatives today?

[ children exclaim ] Just trying to-- Trying to keep our love for our culture and our heritage alive.

For me, it's always gonna entail music, because I believe music, uh, is universal.

A little faint sound was heard in the distance, and you can hear something going on.

And they heard the song.

Shh... [ all singing softly ] [ all singing in Native American language ] Today, powwows are an important part of Native American culture.

The gatherings can be big or small and are held in communities all over the country, often open to a general audience.

Historian David Lewis says that tradition of public performance began at the boarding schools.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Powwow culture then is enhanced in boarding schools 'cause it's the only thing allowed to happen.

And that's where-- That's where a lot of tribal people from different areas learn to sort of work together in some sort of ceremony.

The boarding schools created lifelong connections between tribes.

Boarding school graduates formed a movement of Pan-Indianism, promoting unity of all indigenous people.

In 1911, Native American activists formed the Society of American Indians to advocate for their rights.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In 1924, the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Native Americans, but most lived in generational poverty and were losing their language due to boarding schools.

Because of those direct experiences that happened to Native kids in boarding schools with the sexual abuse, with the physical abuse and that psychological abuse, that all impacts the generations after that.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In the 1920s, a federal study showed that the government's boarding school system was a failure and caused harm to families.

How did the parents of the children feel in the silence after the children were gone?

REBECCA: I can't even go a day or spend the night without my daughter.

And so I know that that broke a lot of hearts, and that was something that was really hard for families to deal with.

And that also led to substance-abuse issues, trying to cope with those feelings like that.

In 1934, Congress enacted the Indian Reorganization Act, aimed at reversing some assimilation and education policies.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Indians in the United States now have fine schools in which there is available to the youth of the race education comparable to those attended by white children.

Throughout the 1930s, New Deal programs provided money for day schools on reservations, and many tribal students attended integrated public schools, but some students still went to boarding schools.

DAVID: Conditions on the reservations are so bad that they want to get their kids away from the reservation and put them in a boarding school further away to get 'em away from things like drug abuse and alcohol abuse and really kind of the depressed economies on the reservations.

With federal boarding schools shutting down, the government sent many children to religious schools.

When we went to Catholic boarding school, my mom said, "Oh, they're religious, they wouldn't hurt my kids."

[ scoffs ] That's a laugh.

We had no idea where were we going.

We... We had suitcases.

The Klamath Tribes has begun documenting these stories in taped oral histories.

Clayton Dumont is the third generation forced into boarding schools.

We were in an environment where suddenly... you had-- Could make no decisions.

Your day was planned from the minute you got up till the day you-- Till you went to bed.

That you, uh... You did exactly what you were told.

You did exactly the same thing every day.

Third and fourth grade teacher, Sister Veronica, she was a hitter.

She pulled hair.

She had a... A 12-inch ruler, the little metal thing on the end that she loved to hit you with.

And I remember her slapping my brother in the face 'cause he was a crier.

These stories document history that would otherwise remain hidden.

Many families can only guess at what their relatives endured.

ABBY: This was a good find, Kami.

This is my grandma's registration for Canyonville Bible Academy.

[ laughs ] And the one question that really got me was, "Do you-- Do any evil habits cling to you?"

[ laughs, sniffles ] She went here first, and then later she went to Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas.

And her two younger sisters were sent down to Stewart Indian School in Nevada.

[ ♪♪♪ ] If our ancestors could survive going to these schools, and we know how bad the schools were, if they were strong enough to do that, we're strong enough to do whatever we're facing today.

The work that I like to do is I want to encourage our youth.

I want to show them that, um, we're able to have beautiful and successful futures, but it's just we have to do some inner healing.

And that means healing ourselves and finding ways to help our families heal themselves as well.

[ ♪♪♪ ] For some tribes, healing comes from bringing their children home.

So the Carlisle Barracks Disinterment Project was initiated back in 2016, as a response to several tribes' requests for their children to be returned.

The process is complex and lengthy.

Only a few children have been returned to their tribes.

One of those was Adam McCarty.

He died in 1883 at the Carlisle Indian School.

Adam was a member of the Modoc Nation, a branch of the Klamath Tribes sent to Oklahoma in 1873.

It's unknown exactly how many Klamath children died and remain buried in boarding school cemeteries, but research has uncovered the names of more than 500 Klamath students who attended boarding schools dating back to the 1870s.

You know, I'll just give a big Mo sepk'eec'a, a big thank you to, uh... To all those, uh, survivors and especially the ones that were able to come back home to give us a little bit of knowledge, 'cause without them, you know, like, yeah, we wouldn't be here without them and their love and their strength to be able to move forward.

In 2021, Deb Haaland, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, announced a study to inventory federally operated schools and investigate their histories.

The report documented abuse, deaths and systematic efforts to destroy Native American culture at hundreds of schools across the country.

The report also called for an apology.

But the federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened until today.

I formally apologize... [ crowd cheering, applauding ] ....as president of the United States of America.

[ ♪♪♪ ] ABBY: To take away the defense of ignorance is a huge thing.

So that's Ben Faye Mitchell.

And then this is... Let's see.

So this is me here.

You're down here.

This is David Hill.

History matters.

Just to be alive and be present today, you are from such strength and resilience, and that needs to be recognized.

And that's such a different perspective than what I was raised with.

And that's a powerful perspective.

The boarding-school experience is no longer being covered up and denied.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ man singing in Native American language ] Leading support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.