San Francisco, California – Phil Smith’s parents dropped him off at the Charles H Burke Indian School in New Mexico when he was five years old, in 1954.

A member of the Navajo Nation, Smith would attend the boarding school just outside the nation’s borders for one year, before moving onto other similar schools in the United States.

He spoke the Navajo language when he arrived but was taught that it “was no good, it’s not useful, (and) you need to only learn English”, explained Smith’s daughter, Farina King, who shared his story with Al Jazeera.

As a result, Smith didn’t teach King or her siblings the Navajo language. “And then I don’t learn Navajo, and I’m placed in this very difficult position where I’m the one who has to do this reconnecting work,” she said.

In 1927, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal government agency, converted former army buildings at Fort Wingate, about 210km (130 miles) west of Albuquerque, into the school for Navajo and Zuni children.

In the 1860s, the ancestors of the Navajo students had been forced to march in what is known as the “Long Walk” to Fort Sumner, where they were confined. One-third died of disease and starvation.

According to a researcher who visited the Charles H Burke Indian School in 1927 as part of a survey of Indian boarding schools in the US, a Navajo girl died from tuberculosis the morning of his visit.

Read the full article about unmarked Indigenous graves by Hilary Beaumont at Aljazeera.