federal cabinet says she wept when she heard news from Canada about what are believed to be unmarked burial sites of children's remains near a former residential school.

The news made Deb Haaland think of her own Pueblo ancestors such as her grandmother, who as a girl was taken from her family, put on a train and placed in the American version of a residential school for five years.

assimilation schools — she's the first Indigenous person to do so. .

In a memo last month to the Department of the Interior, she said the news from Canada should prompt a reflection on what Americans refer to as native boarding schools. .

An architect of Canada's residential schools policy, in an 1879 paper, looked at boarding schools just established in the U.S.

Both countries borrowed ideas from reformatories being constructed in Europe for children of the urban poor, said the Truth and Reconciliation report.

The founder of that school, army officer Richard Pratt, infamously voiced the philosophy behind his program: "Kill the Indian [in him] … and save the man," meaning Indigenous peoples should be assimilated, not exterminated.

He said his father wouldn't talk about his experiences at a boarding school — just like his grandfather before him refused to.

It's not just that lessons presented a rose-tinted version of American history that glossed over uncomfortable details, like Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence — which talks about all men being created equal and then refers to Indigenous peoples as "merciless Indian savages.".

In South Dakota, James Cadwell recalls that at his church-run boarding school, decades ago, students were assigned to read books that referred to Indigenous peoples as savages.

A project is underway to discover whether there were any deaths covered up at the Michigan school Petoskey's father attended, the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. .

The official record shows several children died while attending the school.

He said the news headlines from Canada helped raise awareness of the issue.

Ceremonies to repatriate the remains of children were already underway at the native boarding school founded by Pratt, Pennsylvania's Carlisle school.

She said the Rosebud Sioux students were struck by the cemetery they saw when they stopped during a field trip at the site of the Pennsylvania school, which closed in 1918.

In fact, she said: "I think it's going to be way worse," because there were many more Indigenous boarding schools in the U.S., more than 500 in all.

The author of a book on the history of American Indigenous boarding schools said he's not certain the U.S.

By 1926, more than 80 per cent of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools in the U.S., Adams wrote.

It called the treatment of Indigenous peoples a stain on the national conscience

The Department of the Interior still runs four off-reserve boarding schools today in Oklahoma, California, Oregon and South Dakota

Haaland said these remaining schools bear little resemblance to their historical antecedents. 

He recalls being a traumatized student, over a half-century ago, at a church-run boarding school in South Dakota