ANADARKO, Okla. — Ray Doyah is part of the Kiowa Tribe.
He said the Native population faced many challenges throughout history, but it doesn't stop him from being proud of who he is.
One of the biggest obstacles he faced throughout his lifetime was being forced to attend the Fort Sill Boarding School.
Beginning in the 1800s, the United States began a federally funded boarding school program for Native American children. Many of them died as a result of neglect and abuse in these schools. To this day, many bodies haven't been recovered, leaving families and friends holding on to try and find closure.
WATCH: 2 News talked to members of other tribes about the impact of these schools on them:
Doyah showed 2 News this book from the school he was sent to live at as a child.
While he put up a mental block for most of his time at the school, he remembers how devastated and scared he was when he arrived at the school.
"I knew I had to get out. I had to go inside the building," he said.
He said the only way his family was able to get him out of the car was by 'luring' him out with pumpkin pie.
Below, Doya reads a poem he wrote about getting to the school and his feelings from everything he remembers:
He also vividly remembers one of the attendants at the school.
"The dorm attendant was a senior in high school and he's the one that stayed with us at night and watched over us," said Doyah. "He was really mean to certain ones and made life terrible for this one boy that wet his bed every night. That's an awful scene to see every morning, that little boy terrorized by an older person."
Ray is also a veteran who served the United States in Vietnam.
"It was just the warrior upbringing we had to serve," he said. "It's in my DNA."
He has a veteran counselor who helped him receive therapy. He said she wants him to try to remember more of his past.
"She wants me to write down what I know, but I can't. It's just impossible," he said. "I don't want to go through that anyway if I could."
Toni Tsatoke-Mule knows how Boarding School trauma impacted today's native community.
"Boarding schools have had a tremendous, devastating impact on our tribal communities," said Tsatoke-Mule.
"To extract a child from their parents- and in some cases, they were removed and never seen again."
She said the tribe is making strides to educate the community on these stories and what really happened.
"We try to combat effects of the boarding school era by educating our young people and putting them in position and equipping them to be in positions where they can inform schools, inform decisions made on behalf of students", said Tsatoke-Mule.
"They can then impact decision-making on the administration levels."
The Truth in Healing Actis an example of a bill introduced to the U.S. Government in an effort to acknowledge what happened in the federally-funded boarding schools.
Tsatoke-Mule hopes more education will lead to more representation of Native Americans and indigenous people in legislation. She said that there are many other events that have contributed to generational trauma like the Indian Removal Act and even allotment.
"A lot of times, people think of allotment solely as a land issue, but what it did was it broke up our tribal communities," she said. "It put space and distance between families and communities that lives very close to one another."
Tsatoke-Mule said the tribe has worked with schools to revitalize and "reclaim" their language after facing assimilation.
Below, she outlines the language programs offered to students:
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