A reckoning more than a century in the making.

America has hidden the truth from America.

As an award-winning NBC News investigative team heads to the South Dakota Badlands in

the Pine Ridge Reservation, to hear their untold stories.

I don't want to repeat it.

Of children forcibly taken from their homes and abused.

I became a shallow breeder, thinking that if I don't breathe well, I might disappear.

And to uncover painful truths.

In rich hearts.

In what we write.

That might question.

To bear witness to an unspeakable chapter in America's history.

They are being rapidly brought from their state of savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.

It's hard to know what genocide is if this isn't it.

How do we make sense of a policy of the US government that forcibly separated and estimated

100,000 children from their parents, withheld food from those who protested or threw them

in jail, that took those often traumatized children, some as young as four, to boarding

schools where their language was forbidden and their beliefs rejected, where the death rate

far exceeded those of white children and where abused both physical and sexual was commonplace.

What to call such a system.

Those who created it back in the mid-1800s called it the Federal Indian boarding school

system.

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