U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland starts an important journey Saturday to examine the troubling past of federal Indian boarding school policies and practices. This path begins in Oklahoma at the Riverside Indian School, located north of Anadarko on Wichita, Caddo and Delaware land.

While most of the boarding schools have closed, the Riverside Indian School remains the oldest and largest off-reservation school in the U.S., with about 800 students.

We welcome Haaland to our state with the “Road to Healing” year-long project. This will be a difficult history to hear, but reconciliation efforts are always worth it.

Haaland, the first Indigenous person to serve as Interior secretary, will be taking oral histories at each site to understand what happened and how that had generational effects.

This came after Canada announced last year the horrific discovery of mass graves of children on the grounds of former Indigenous boarding schools there, many operated by the Catholic Church. The children had been forcibly removed from their families and sent to these institutions.

In response, Haaland ordered in June 2021 an investigation — called the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative — into similar schools in the United States. The initiative seeks information such as names and tribal identities of children placed in the schools, the marked and unmarked graves of Indigenous children on those campuses, and first-hand experiences at those schools.

The first volume of findings released in May found that from 1819 to 1969, there were 408 federal Indian boarding schools across 37 states or territories. It identified burial sites at approximately 53 different schools, but that number is expected to grow.

The U.S. government enacted laws started in 1871 compelling Indian children into school, withholding rations and treaty-guaranteed benefits for resisting. Even before then, the federal government supported these schools. Those laws and policies remained in place through the next century.

Oklahoma had the largest number of such schools, with 76.

This is not ancient history. Students who attended some of these schools are living and speak about abusive treatment by caregivers. Their trauma never went away, and that harm extended to their tribes and families.

What those families endured and how those children were treated influence tribal relationships with the U.S. and state governments today.

American Indian history is Oklahoma’s history. The descendants of one of the nation’s greatest genocides and swindles of land — the Trail of Tears — live within the state’s borders, along with 39 tribal nations’ headquarters.

It’s a travesty that the federal government hasn’t done more to discover what happened in those schools until now. It has been an ignored part of U.S. history, and it is never too late to make it right.