For 150 years the US government sent Native American children to remote so-called

boarding schools as part of a systematic effort to seize tribal lands and eradicate

Native American culture.

Dozens of these boarding schools were run by the Catholic Church or its affiliates.

A new Washington Post investigation has revealed widespread sexual abuse of generations of these children at many of those institutions.

Lisa Desjardan has the story and a warning the story contains sensitive subject material.

Jeff, this report documents story contains sensitive subject material.

Jeff, this report documents the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by over 100 priests, sisters, and brothers.

But experts believe that number is likely a significant

undercount. Earlier today we spoke with Deborah Parker, Chief Executive of

the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

For us, this is a national crime scene and our relatives, our Native American relatives, deserve

to know the truth.

For more, we're joined by Washington Post reporter, Dana Hedgepath, who was part of the team

that reported this story and is a member of the Hallawa-Sopony Tribe of North Carolina.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Can you help our viewers understand the scope of the abuse that you uncovered?

This is a very important topic and there's been a lot of work already done on this.

We hope to move the ball forward and shed new light on it.

And what we found in our investigation gave new details about the level of sexual abuse

that was done by Catholic priests, sisters, and brothers from the 1800s to the 1900s at schools.

Most of the abuse occurred in the 1950s and 60s and involved a thousand children and experts like Deb Parker and others believe that that is

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