by Mary Annette Pember
Pantheon Books
4/22/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9780553387315
A sweeping and deeply personal account of Native American boarding schools in the United States, and the legacy of abuse wrought by them in an attempt to destroy Native culture and life
From the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their tribal communities to attend boarding schools whose stated aim was to "save the Indian" by way of assimilation. In reality, these boarding schools--sponsored by the U.S. government, but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation--were a calculated attempt to dismantle tribes by pulling apart Native families. Children were beaten for speaking their Native languages; denied food, clothing, and comfort; and forced to work menial jobs in terrible conditions, all while utterly deprived of love and affection.
Amongst those thousands of children was Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother, who was sent to a boarding school in northern Wisconsin at age five. The trauma of her experience cast a pall over Pember's own childhood and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark but hopeful portrait of communities still reckoning with the trauma of acculturation, religion, and abuse caused by the state. Through searing interviews and careful reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of Native cultures and nations in relation to the country that has been intent on eradicating them.
Reviews:
"Mary Annette Pember has left it all on the line. Through her, her Ojibwe ancestors speak boldly about how the US government has treated them and every Indigenous nation in these so-called-United States. I have never read a book that has changed me so profoundly. Pember not only points to what has been done, but also offers a way forward. Everyone, absolutely everyone, should read this book." -- Javier Zamora, author of Solito
"So much writing about historical trauma casts a vague, impenetrable cloud over its subjects' lives. But with electric precision and rigorous care, Mary Annette Pember pierces through, illuminating the real mechanisms by which pain has accumulated and reverberated through generations of boarding school survivors and their descendants, as well all the beauty, love, and humor these same lives contain. In showing us how trauma is made, Pember helps us see that it can be unmade. 'History flows through us, ' she writes, and nowhere has this idea been so well rendered as here, in this stunning, essential book." -- Sierra Crane Murdoch, author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country
"Pember has written a searing exploration of the multi-generational trauma visited upon Native people by the boarding school experience, as well as a brilliant account of Indigenous survivance." --Michael Witgen, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, author of Seeing Red
About the Author:
Mary Annette Pember is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe. She is currently national correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. She has also worked as an independent journalist focusing on Native American issues since 2000. Pember is the recipient of the Clarion Award, several Associated Press awards, and the Medill Milestone Achievement Award as well as Type Investigations' Ida B. Wells Fellowship, a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, and the USC Annenberg National Health Journalism Fellowship. Her work has appeared in R eveal News, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among other publications. She currently lives with her husband and two children in Cincinnati. Medicine River is her first book.