MEDICINE RIVER: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, by Mary Annette Pember
In 1892, Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of one of the country’s first Native American boarding schools, told an audience, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” referring to George Armstrong Custer’s bloody massacres. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Before establishing the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Pratt participated in the forced removal of tribes from the southern plains while a U.S. calvary officer. The school was another act of genocide: Upon entering, children were given English names, forced to convert to Christianity and punished for speaking in their native languages or observing tribal customs.
Pratt’s institution became the model for more than 500 religious and federal boarding schools attended by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children between 1819 and the 1970s. While some parents willingly sent their offspring, many more resisted and endured beatings, imprisonment and denial of their treaty-guaranteed food rations.
“Through force or poverty-fueled necessity, so many Indian children were taken to boarding schools through the 1970s,” writes Mary Annette Pember in her piercing new memoir, “Medicine River,” “that virtually no Indian family remains untouched by the experience today.”
Pember is perfectly positioned to write this book. She’s an enrolled citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, a journalist who has reported on Native issues for more than two decades and the granddaughter and daughter of boarding school survivors.
“Medicine River” weaves together the history of the U.S. government’s brutal crusades to exterminate, then assimilate, Native Americans, with her mother’s experience at St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Mission School, in Odanah, Wis.
Bernice Rabideaux was just 5 when she and her four siblings were brought to the school after the implosion of their parents’ marriage. The nuns treated the students more like inmates than children, goading them through a rigid schedule of worship, chores and classes that permitted only one free hour a day.
The girls spent much of their time cleaning — scrubbing floors, washing dishes, doing laundry — under the supervision of sisters who were quick to slap or call them “dirty Indians.” Constantly hungry, Rabideaux resorted to stealing food and was once whipped for taking an apple.
Rabideaux spent eight years in this loveless environment, only rarely seeing her parents. Although she left after she graduated eighth grade, her harrowing experience at what she called the “Sister School” warped the rest of her life.
“I can still see her as she tried to outrun her invisible tormentors,” Pember writes of her mother. “She was lost to our family during these times. She could never speak of nor even allow herself to remember all that happened. Instead, she kept her little hands and stories clenched into fists.”
Rabideaux suffered migraines, nameless fears and hypervigilance — all hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. As a small child, Pember hid from her mother’s violent mood swings under the kitchen table.
Rabideaux seemed fixated on cleanliness. “‘Get down on those prayer bones, girl,’ she’d say as she instructed me on how to clean the floor. Often, she muttered, ‘We may be Indian, but by God we ain’t dirty.’”
After running away at age 13, Pember was sent to juvenile hall, where she inked “squaw” into her arm — “an attempt to make that derogatory term so often used against me my own.” Then came stints of homelessness, of numbing herself with drugs and booze.
Eventually, Pember enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she became active in the Indian student organization and graduated with a degree in journalism.
Although Pember wrote about the boarding schools in her capacity as a journalist, her mother balked at questions about her own experiences at the Sister School, which closed in 1969. It was only after Rabideaux died that Pember visited the school’s archives to better understand her mother’s trauma — as well as her own.
The horrors of the boarding school system are still being revealed. In 2021, the discovery of more than a thousand unmarked graves at residential schools in Canada drew international headlines and, in 2023, Canada agreed to pay some $2 billion in reparations to survivors.
The United States has begun its own reckoning. Deb Haaland, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior — whose great-grandfather attended Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School — conducted a listening tour to meet survivors and record their stories.
In 2024, the Interior Department identified 74 burial sites at various schools containing the remains of nearly a thousand Indigenous children. That same year, The Washington Post published exposes on widespread sexual abuse at Catholic-run boarding schools and put the student death toll at more than 3,100 — three times the official number. President Biden issued a formal apology for “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.” The apology has since been removed from the White House website.
Only a year later, the U.S. government is again engaging in the erasure of Native Americans, part of the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion. Pages referencing the contributions of Native soldiers have been deleted from the Army’s website. The Pentagon took down web pages featuring the Navajo Code Talkers — whose encrypted messages helped secure an Allied victory in the Pacific during World War II — only to restore them after public outcry. With a government that is rewriting history in real time, “Medicine River” stands as a testament to the truth.
Pember has continued her own journey of healing, through increasing connection with Ojibwe culture. At the book’s close, she shares the ecstatic experience of dancing in a powwow held within sight of her mother’s former school, now in ruins.
“Surrounded by friends and family, we laughed and celebrated together,” she writes. “Not only have we survived, but we have flourished.”
MEDICINE RIVER: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools | By Mary Annette Pember | Pantheon | 292 pp. | $29
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