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, Dana Hedgepeth.

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

Dana, welcome back to the NewsHour.

Thank you.

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?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Let's step back for a minute and think about the time of when these schools was set up 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, 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.

...