Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, offers a searing account of Indian boarding schools and the impact they continue to have on families, communities and cultures. From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, nearly 500 of these schools operated in the United States, some run by the government and others by Christian missionaries or the Catholic Church. Tens of thousands of Native children, including Pember’s mother, were forced or coerced to attend; there, they were made to reject their own language and culture. Abuse was rampant. In the past decade, the trickle of truth about the grim realities of boarding schools has become a mightier stream, in part due to Pember’s own pen. Part memoir and part journalistic expose, Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools is her magnum opus, a must-read for all people who long to see justice flow.
Pember’s mother grew up in a Wisconsin boarding school after being abandoned by her parents. As a child, Pember heard her mother’s stories, including a tale of a nun whose punishments were so cruel that her fall down a flight of stairs was cause for celebration. Pember contextualizes these stories within the wider history of boarding schools as tools of Native control and forced assimilation. There are so many losses. Pember mourns the cultural identity and connection that her mother didn’t have, and she returns to her extended family to learn more about what happened to her mother and to reconcile her own trauma.
All of this is tremendously personal. But Pember sets her account against the history of boarding schools writ large: the many abandoned and hidden graves of children, the ongoing refusal of the Catholic Church to relinquish documentation that might help families learn what happened to their loved ones, the beginning of reparations in Canada and the long road ahead. Pember’s willingness to share how her own life was shaped by the boarding schools, while simultaneously reporting on the phenomenon of boarding schools historically and how we reckon with their existence today, makes Medicine River an unforgettable read. In sharing her story, Pember gestures to the vast untold experiences of people impacted by these schools. By acknowledging this past and reviving the cultural practices that were ripped away, she remains hopeful that healing can occur.
