(AP) — Victims of government-backed Native American boarding schools are expected to share their experiences Sunday as U.S. officials make a final stop in Montana on their yearlong tour to confront the institutions that regularly abused students to assimilate them into white society. For over 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into the boarding schools. A Native American boarding school school in the town of St. Ignatius on the Flathead Reservation was open until at least 1973. In southeastern Montana the Tongue River Boarding School operated under various names until at least 1970, when the Northern Cheyenne Tribe contracted it as a tribal school, according to government records. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has tallied an additional 113 schools not on the government list that were run by churches and with no evidence of federal support.

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Persons: Deb Haaland, Wizipan Garriott, Garriott, They’ve, Fort, Ignatius, — Organizations: —, Montana State University, Interior Department, Boarding School, Northern Cheyenne Tribe, National, American Boarding School, Coalition Locations: BOZEMAN, Mont, Montana, Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, Bozeman, U.S, Alaska, Hawaii, Rosebud Sioux, Oklahoma , South Dakota , Michigan, Arizona, Blackfeet, Fort Peck, Fort Belknap, St