French settlers called it Bad River; to the Native Americans who lived there first, it was always Mashkiiziibii: Medicine River. According to Mary Annette Pember in her powerful new book of that name, the Ojibwe (sometimes Anglicized as Chippewa) believed that everything needed for a good life could be found “in its coffee-colored waters and along its banks.”
It was there, in an Ojibwe community in northern Wisconsin, that Pember’s mother, Bernice Rabideaux, was born a century ago. The prosperous timber industry, having stripped the region of its eastern white pine, was in retreat, leaving poverty in its wake. In 1930, as the Depression raged, Bernice and her siblings were sent to St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School in Odanah. She was 5.
“Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools” is an important work in the growing literature about the trauma those boarding schools inflicted on generations of Native peoples. Unlike other notable entries, including David Wallace Adams’ “Education for Extinction” and Bill Vaughn’s “The Plot Against Native America,” Pember’s book blends her research and reportage with memoir. It is, “above all, a quest. To understand myself, our family’s collective disease, Indian people’s unparalleled ability to survive, and the history of Indian boarding schools.”
From their inception in the 19th century, these schools explicitly sought to eradicate Indigenous culture and instill in Native peoples the language and mores of white settlers. Pember’s description of school life is correspondingly harrowing. Methods of discipline included “whipping, beating, incarceration, and the withholding of food.” Children as young as 4 slept in crowded dormitories. Disease was rampant. “Students were forbidden to speak their traditional languages at the schools and forced to learn English. Sometimes teachers would wash students’ mouths out with lye soap.”
For some, school was effectively a death sentence. As Pember reports in the book, 74 burial sites, accounting for nearly 1,000 students, were identified by the Department of the Interior under Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo). The government’s investigations only began in 2021, though, and its 2022 report was deemed “far from complete.” Indeed, since her book was edited, Pember has herself written about a revised estimate of more than 3,000 student deaths. Meanwhile, just over the border from Medicine River, Canada has found more than 2,000 unmarked graves at residential schools. And as the story continues to break open, devastating revelations keep coming. The Oscar-nominated documentary “Sugarcane,” co-directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen), included witness reports of newborns immolated in a school incinerator.
The Interior Department’s report only covered government-run schools. In practice, many of the schools, including St. Mary’s, were operated by the Catholic Church or other religious organizations. Their archives, as Pember reports, are often inaccessible; a bureaucratic fog obscures much of the record. But bit by bit that’s changing. A 2024 Washington Post investigation that drew in part on Pember’s work provided horrendous new information describing what it calls the “pervasive sexual abuse endured by Native American children at Catholic-run schools in remote regions of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.”
“Most U.S. citizens have dodged this history by default; it has never been presented to them,” Pember writes. (This is no exaggeration: 27 states “make no mention of a single Native American in their K–12 curriculum,” as the National Congress of American Indians reported in 2019.) “But Indians don’t have the luxury of ignorance. History flows through us; it is embedded in us.”
Pember bore witness to this. “My mother’s migraines hold me prisoner for much of my childhood,” she writes. “I recall the sharp corners of my mother’s arms during her infrequent hugs.” Bernice suffered greatly at St. Mary’s. She was called a “dirty Indian” by the Mother Superior. Corporal punishment was common. When her own mother visited two years after she and her siblings arrived at the school, it was to inform them that she’d remarried and had no room for them. It’s easy to understand how, as a mother herself, Bernice might have struggled to provide adequate affection.
Pember inherited her mother’s scars and acquired some of her own. At a Wisconsin elementary school in the 1960s, she faced racism and presumptions of idiocy. She spent time in a juvenile detention center. “I was an Indian, inferior and broken.” Though she later became the first college graduate in her family, she continued to face “entrenched sexism and racism” at work and drank to cope. (She has been sober since 2000.)
In one chapter, Pember explores epigenetic research into trauma, the hypothesis that trauma responses might be inherited even without changes in the DNA sequence. She cites research suggesting that “high rates of addiction, suicide, mental illness, sexual violence, and other ills among Indian peoples might be, at least in part, influenced by historical trauma.” Even when authorities have tried to help, she notes, their assistance has often been ill-directed: The American Psychological Assn. has conceded that so-called western psychological methods have proved inadequate in treating Native peoples’ mental health.
Redress is urgent. As Ned Blackhawk wrote in “The Rediscovery of America,” his National Book Award–winning history, “The exclusion of Native Americans was codified in the Constitution, maintained throughout the antebellum era, and legislated into the twentieth century: far from being incidental, it enabled the development of the United States. U.S. history as we currently know it does not account for the centrality of Native Americans.” Pember’s journalism and advocacy, along with that of a growing number of writers and activists, both Native and not, are making clear the scope and impact of one major pillar of this epochal injustice.
The scale of the boarding school system, Pember observes, means almost no Native family is untouched by its dreadful legacy. In “Medicine River,” as she comes to understand and forgive her mother for her negligence and cruelty, the reader is shown the devastating effects of trauma and the possibility of hope. But at a time when the government is expressing open hostility toward Native peoples through disdain for DEI initiatives and disregard for tribal sovereignty, it’s essential that stories like Pember’s stories are amplified and the momentum toward justice is sustained until such a time as it can be delivered.
Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.