More than 3,000 Native American children died in the custody of the U.S. government after being forced to attend boarding schools from the 1800s to 1960s, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That's three times the number of lives lost that the government documented in its own investigation released earlier this year.
The U.S. Interior Department found 973 children died during a 150-year period at the schools that stripped children of their language and culture to assimilate them into white society. The children suffered abuse, starvation, beatings and forced labor.
PBS News Hour's William Brangham spoke with one of the lead reporters on this story, Dana Hedgpeth, who said they built on the government's work to give a more "complete accounting" of the "systematic effort" to seize tribal lands and erase Native American culture.
"These are not the schools that your children or my children in modern times would be subjected to," Hedgpeth said. "They really were not. And as a very wise woman from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation said to me, 'what schools have cemeteries?'"
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