Nearly 1,000 Indigenous children died while being forced to attend U.S. federal government boarding schools that sought to exterminate Native American identity, language and culture. Those were the final findings of a groundbreaking report published Tuesday by the Interior Department, which for the first time in its history accounts for the U.S. government’s role in the gruesome assimilation practices enforced at the schools. The report, which calls for a formal apology from the federal government, was commissioned by the first Indigenous U.S. Cabinet member, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend boarding school starting at the age of 8.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland: “The Department of the Interior, the very Cabinet agency created to assimilate Indigenous peoples, released a historic investigative report detailing the impact, trauma and damage caused by federal Indian boarding schools from 1819 through the 1970s. This trauma is not new to Indigenous people. One of the reasons I launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative was to ensure that this important story was told, that all of America knows of the intergenerational impacts of these policies, and that we, as a nation, take steps to heal from them.”