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In 2022, a federal investigation confirmed what Native families had been saying for generations. The children who never came home were real, and there were far more of them than the country wanted to admit.The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, the first investigation of its kind by the US government, identified more than 400 boarding schools that operated across the country between 1819 and 1969. Researchers documented marked and unmarked burial sites at dozens of them, and the initial count of children who died was in the hundreds, with officials warning the true number would climb much higher as the work continued. These were children taken from their parents, often hundreds of miles away, and many were buried where they fell without their families ever being told.What makes the report matter is not just the counting. For the first time, the weight of the federal government stood behind the truth of these stories instead of denying them. Survivors who had carried these memories alone for decades finally heard their government say the words out loud. It does not undo anything. But acknowledgment is where repair has to begin.Standing at a quiet row of small stones like these, it is hard not to think about the families on the other end of that silence. Why do you think it took until 2022 for a full accounting to even begin? The hatred the whites It was bread into them to hate Native Americans.There's more horrible things that happened to them. Some were killed and cremated so there would be no sign of them even being there.