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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania to honor the resilience of Native tribes whose young people were forced to attend school and many abusive establishments.

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Biden announced the construction of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument while hosting tribal leaders at a summit at the White House.

Thousands of young people passed through the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School when it closed in 1918, along with Olympian Jim Thorpe. They come from dozens of tribes subject to forced assimilation policies aimed at erasing Native American traditions and “civilizing” children so they can better integrate into white society.

READ MORE: Addressing history ‘is a sin for our souls,’ Biden says in historic apology to Indigenous communities

It’s the first school of its kind and has become a style for a network of government-supported Native American boarding schools that eventually expanded to at least 37 states.

“Approximately 7,800 young people from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlyle, stolen from their families, tribes and countries of origin. It was a mistake to make the Carlisle Indian School a national model,” Biden said at the White House summit. Don’t delete history. We recognize it, we inform ourselves about it and we will never repeat it again.

Thorpe’s great-grandson, James Thorpe Kossakowski, called Biden’s nomination “historic” and a step toward broadening Americans’ understanding of the federal government’s forced assimilation policy.

“It’s very emotional for me to walk around, to look at the area where my great-grandfather had gone through school, where he had met my great-grandmother, where they were married, where he stayed in his dorm room, where he worked out and trained,” Kossakowski, 54, of Elburn, Illinois, said in an interview.

The children were often taken against the will of their parents, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases.

WATCH: Sexual abuse of Native American children in boarding schools revealed in new report

“Designating the former Carlisle School campus, with barriers consistent with the National Historic Landmark, as a national monument will ensure that this shameful breakdown of American history is never forgotten or repeated,” Biden said in his proclamation for the memorial.

Efforts are under way to repatriate the remains of the children, who were buried at the site, to their country of origin.

“They make up 50 tribal nations from Alaska to New Mexico to New York, and I think that symbolizes how terrible Carlisle was,” said Beth Margaret Wright, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund that has formed tribes seeking to get the military back. the remains of her children. and who is herself a member of the Pueblo de Laguna, where the young people are still buried.

Carlisle was a role style for many other schools that followed and a large majority of the tribal nations that exist today have stories that their young people were sent to Carlisle, Wright said.

In September, the remains of three young men who died in Carlisle were exhumed and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

At least 973 Native American children died at government-funded boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an Interior Department investigation.

During a series of public listening sessions on reserves organized in recent years through the Home Office, school survivors recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for their local language.

The forced assimilation policy officially ended with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.

Biden in October apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for the schools and the policies that supported them.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families’ will, said no single action would adequately address the harms caused by the schools. But she said the administration’s efforts have made a difference and the new monument would allow the American people to learn more about the government’s harmful policies.

“This trauma is not new to Indigenous peoples, but it is new to many other people in our country,” Haaland said in a statement.

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the assimilation campaign.

Monday’s announcement marks the seventh national monument created by Biden. The 25-acre site (10 hectares) will be managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Army. The site is part of the campus of the U.S. Army War College.

For Wright, one of the most powerful places at the Carlisle school is where imprints of the since-removed train tracks were that delivered children there.

“There are no railroad tracks there, but you can see where they might have been and where their children would have first come and noticed such a remote and terrible position,” Wright said.

Native American tribes and conservation teams are pushing for more monuments to be designated before Biden leaves office.

Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

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