Photo taken on May 17, 2022 shows an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Native American tribal elders who were once students at government-backed Indian boarding schools have testified about the hardships they endured, including beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, forced haircuts and painful nicknames, reported The Associated Press (AP).

"They came from different states and different tribes, but they shared the common experience of having attended the schools that were designed to strip Indigenous people of their cultural identities," said the report last week.

"Federal Indian boarding school policies have touched every Indigenous person I know," said U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, herself a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico and the first Native American cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

"My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead. This is the first time in history that a cabinet secretary comes to the table with this shared trauma," she told the testification event.

Haaland's agency 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, according to the report.