SEATTLE (AP) — Clarita Vargas was sent to an Indian boarding school some four decades ago to study her ABCs and learn to blend in with majority culture. She says she instead learned a nightmarish lesson — that children sometimes have no one to protect them from pedophiles.

On Friday, the 51-year-old had her “day of reckoning and justice” when Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus agreed to pay $166.1 million to hundreds of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives who were abused at its schools around the Pacific Northwest.

The settlement is one of the largest in the Catholic Church’s sweeping sex abuse scandal.

Vargas said she and her two sisters were abused at St. Mary’s Mission and School, a former Jesuit-run boarding school on the reservation near Omak, Wash., in the late 1960s and 1970s.

St. Mary’s now operates as Paschal Sherman Indian School and is run by the Colville Tribe.

The Oregon Province, has been accused of using its schools in remote villages and on reservations as dumping grounds for problem priests.

Attorneys representing the mostly Native American and Alaskan Native victims said the abuse added to the mistreatment already endured by these children, some of whom were forcibly removed from their homes to attend these schools.

The settlement between over 450 victims and the province also calls for a written apology to the victims and disclosure of documents to them, including their medical records.

The Province ran village and reservation schools in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. The claims are from victims who were students at schools in all five states.

The province previously settled another 200 claims. It then filed for bankruptcy in 2009, claiming the payments depleted its treasury.