The Lakota youth were among 10,000 Native American children taken from their families and placed in a boarding school 1,400 miles away.

ROSEBUD SIOUX RESERVATION, SOUTH DAKOTAIt was a long-awaited journey for the families of nine Lakota children who died at an Indian boarding school more than a century ago. After six years of lobbying, the remains were finally handed over, wrapped in buffalo hides and placed in the comfort of Grandmother Earth at their ancestral lands.

The Lakota youth were taken from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in 1879 and placed in the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School almost 1,400 miles away in Pennsylvania, never to be seen alive again. Their reburial last month was the start of many more to come as unmarked graves are discovered across the United States, exposing the brutal history of boarding schools set up to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children.