U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland will visit Oklahoma on Saturday for the first stop on a yearlong nationwide tour to hear about the painful experiences of Native Americans who were sent to government-backed boarding schools designed to strip them of their cultural identities.
Haaland, of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, is the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history, and the agency she oversees recently released a report that identified more than 400 of the schools, which sought to assimilate Native children into white society during a period that stretched from the late 18th century until the late 1960s.
