Alone as a child tucked in at night, Mary Annette Pember had visions. “Strings of lights, rather like phosphorescent snakes,” she writes, would float along the ceiling of her bedroom, turning and twisting in the dark.
When she asked what the strange lights could be, her mother, an Ojibwe from northern Wisconsin, urged her not to be afraid: They want to protect you; they won’t hurt you, but don’t ever tell anyone else you see them.
Her mother knew what it took to survive. Sometimes that meant looking with eyes wide open in the dark. Pember’s affecting new book, “Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools,” does just that.
Full of unvarnished anguish, it’s both a solemn history of the pervasive abuse of Native children in federal boarding schools and a visceral family memoir about Pember’s mother, Bernice Rabideaux, a traumatized Ojibwe child who emerged a strong but suffering Ojibwe woman.
Beginning in the 1860s and over the next hundred years, many Native children across the country were forced to attend Indian boarding schools, often run by the Catholic Church, as a means of assimilation. There they regularly endured humiliation, violence, deprivation and sometimes death, devastating their lives and their families.
Bernice Rabideaux was one such child, who, from the age of 5 through adolescence. attended St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Mission School, or “Sister School,” on the Bad River reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin. According to the book, the experience created an intractable conflict between white Christian settler values and her Ojibwe values of community and environmental stewardship. She died in 2011 at the age of 86.
Pember, who moved here to work at the Cincinnati Enquirer, is the former president of the Native American Journalists’ Association and a freelance writer. Talking about “Medicine River” recently at her home in a quiet Cincinnati neighborhood, she exuded wary authority. Asked about coming to terms with a parent coming to terms with trauma, she demurred. Her mother, she said, “never really thought of herself as coming to terms with anything. I think she wanted to leave that behind, but you never could. It was just in there, in a sound or a smell or quality of light.”
Rabideaux took great pride in her heritage, but coercive assimilation at the Sister School left a permanent mark, her daughter explained. “The white world that we entered into, she was successful in it,” Pember said, “but it was just so disappointing to her. There was just so little emotional and spiritual sustenance. I think that she really hungered for her origins.”
David Treuer, the author of “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” and an editor-at-large at Pantheon Books, which published “Medicine River,” invoked the motto of second-wave feminism — “the personal is political” — in framing Pember’s blend of history and memoir.
“It was largely a matter of trying to see how the forces of history flowed through her mother’s life and her life through their relationship — and being really attuned to the ways in which history flows through all of us,” he explained.
The 2021 discovery of a mass grave holding the remains of 215 First Nations children on the site of a former residential school in Canada — over 4,000 First Nations children died in such schools — set in motion a historical reckoning there and in the United States.
Deb Haaland, then the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to investigate the legacy of boarding school policies and to consider their intergenerational impact. After its report was released in 2024, President Biden issued a formal apology on behalf of the federal government.
“My goal has always been about healing,” Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, said in a recent interview. “And I don’t think you can heal from things unless you highlight them, unless you face them.”
After high school, 19-year-old Bernice Rabideaux moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, where her four siblings lived. Soon enough she married Charles Gordon Pember, a kind and stable man. For a time she cleaned offices and worked at a factory canning vegetables. One of the offices was that of Leon Feingold, the father of former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold. The Feingolds would become lifelong friends, encouraging her fledgling political consciousness. She joined a Democratic women’s organization and, in 1964, campaigned for Lyndon Johnson in his run for the presidency.
Yet she was ambivalent about her life. She “became a shape-shifter, transforming herself according to her surroundings,” Pember writes. “On the one hand, she encouraged [her children] to conform to the white world, but at the same time she not so secretly despised us for trying.”
When the family visited the reservation, it would take her mother time to settle in, Pember recalls in the book. Seeing Lake Superior, “she would gaze out toward that perfect line between water and sky, her thin arms wrapped around herself; we could see she was home.”
Still, her fragile peace couldn’t last. For many former boarding school students like Rabideaux, the wounds of the flesh were the wounds of the soul.
And when she worked herself into a rage, a young Pember felt the impact. “I stood by helplessly; I said nothing,” she writes. “I learned to be quiet. From my place under the table I secretly began constructing my own armor and defiance.”
As an adult, Pember married, had a family and pursued a prolific career in journalism. She also suffered from alcoholism. As time went on, she sought out Ojibwe spiritual practices, which require sobriety for participation. After getting sober and with her life now rooted in her heritage, she felt a greater sense of serenity.
Yet one challenge remained: to tell the story of her mother.
“It was like she gave me this baton,” Pember explained. ”She never overtly told me, but I just knew that I had to do it.”
Starting in 1980, she began to write down her mother’s first-person accounts of her school years and life on the reservation. She also spent more than 20 years researching Indian boarding schools in federal and Catholic church archives, along with conducting over 50 interviews, for what would come to be “Medicine River.”
It has provided Pember a sense of closure that her mother likely never attained.
“I honored her,
her quest she sent me on,” she said. “So I’m done with that now.”
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