At Age 7 Ramona Klein Survived Abuse at a Native American Boarding School: 'I Still Sometimes Cry'

The horrific details behind one of the darkest chapters in American history was recently brought to light with the release of a 106-page investigative report by the U.S. Department of the Interior that acknowledged the systematic abuse and deaths that occurred at government-run Native American boarding schools.

For 150 years — between 1819 and 1969 — the U.S. government forced hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their families and sent them to live in 408 federal boarding schools in 37 states in an effort to strip away their cultural ties and force assimilation into white Anglo-American culture. The report revealed that over 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died at these institutions — but the real number of deaths, according to investigators, could be in the "tens of thousands."

Says Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents attended one of the boarding schools: "It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous Peoples can continue to grow and heal."

One of those survivors is retired educator Dr. Ramona Klein, 75, of Medina, North Dakota, who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Klein recently spoke to PEOPLE for a story in this week's issue about her ordeal. Here's Klein's experience, in her own words:

My first memory was getting on a big green government bus in 1954 and looking out the window at my mother crying as she held my little brother's hand. I was 7 years old. I had this feeling of loneliness and complete loss as we were driven to the Fort Totten Indian Boarding School. It was located in a former military base about 120 miles from our reservation.

After we arrived, we were told to take off our clothes and I sat on a stool as they cut all my long hair off, so that I looked like a little boy. I was placed in a dormitory room with eight other little girls. We lived on mush made from corn meal, but there was never enough and I often had hunger pains. I would take whatever I could — I refused to call it stealing — from the cafeteria to try make the hunger go away.

I got hit a lot by the school's matron. She would come into our room with a broom at night, put it on the floor and tell me to kneel on the broomstick. I'd have to stretch my arms out like an eagle, and she would hit me with this paddle. It would leave black and blue bruises all over my lower back, but I was always determined not to let her get the best of me and never once cried. On other nights, the son of somebody who worked at the school would come into our room with a flashlight and do things to me that no child should ever have to experience.

For more on Ramona Klein, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

During the four years I spent there, I lost track of how many times we were told how dumb we were and shamed for being Indigenous persons. I refused to cry for years and years afterwards, but decades later I finally cried. It felt like something burst inside me. Trauma like that gets passed from one generation to the next, and the healing process, I've learned, is a very long journey. Even now, whenever I drive past that school, I still sometimes cry, because that's where something was taken from me. That's where I lost my childhood.