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Review: The Personal and National Tragedy of American Indian Boarding Schools [1]
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Date: 2025-05-15
The stories in Mary Annette Pember’s new book, Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, are almost unbearable. They are stories of the forced assimilation of Indian children: beatings, constant belittling, sexual abuse, sickness, and suicide, all under the blessing of the Catholic Church and United States government.
Yet the book is a testament to the generations of American Indians who did, indeed, bear those stories. It is also Pember’s personal attempt to understand how her own mother was shaped by her experience of growing up as a student at such a school.
In the course of the book, we learn that Bernice Pember, Mary Annette’s mother, was just one of countless Native children over generations who endured violence, cultural denigration, malnutrition, medical deprivation, and more, often at the hands of Christian missionaries backed by the U.S. government.
The stated goal of the Indian boarding schools was to assimilate Indians into white American culture. Pember’s book is a partial reckoning with what these schools accomplished instead: generations of families who endured despite the schools, not because of them.
The stories Pember heard from her mother are ones no child should hear, much less personally endure. There is Pember’s mother at the age of 5, sitting on a little bed in a barren dormitory at a Catholic boarding school in Wisconsin’s Bad River Reservation, stuffing her mouth with chocolates, the final gift from a family she wouldn’t see again for a long time.
Three 11-year-old boys, finally sick of the treatment at their boarding school, escape to the woods. They live off of stolen eggs and potatoes until a store clerk discovers one of the boys, Charlie Fiester, and shoots him dead.
Boarding school principals wrote to parents to tell them their child had died of tuberculosis and, in a final indignity, would be buried “as white people” at the school cemetery.
Pember also writes about herself, curled up next to her mother, hearing these horrors (as we are) for the first time. These were her bedtime stories.
Bernice Pember and several other family members were enrolled in St. Mary’s Catholic Indian boarding school in Odanah, Wisconsin. It was one of more than 500 boarding schools in the United States. About 100 of those were Catholic-operated, funded partly by tribes’ own trust and treaty funds through the church’s financial trickery. Over a period of nine years in the 1930s and 1940s, Indian people paid $30.4 million (adjusted for inflation) for boarding school tuition. “In effect, we were paying for our own forced assimilation,” Pember writes. The assimilation through education began in the early 19th century and stretched well into the 20th. Some of those schools are still open today, though they have changed their practices. Indian children from Pennsylvania to Alaska suffered in these schools.
Medicine River is part biography, part memoir, part history, and part investigative journalism. “Why do you always go poking?,” Mary Annette Pember’s mother would respond to her endless questions about the past. “Poking is what journalists do,” Pember writes. “It’s also what children do.”
Pember has written a sprawling national history, but her initial goal was to figure out her mother, a woman whose own trauma and bad decisions made her daughter’s life often hellish. But in talking to relatives and digging through archives, Mary Annette found the claw marks of the American forced assimilation project all over her family tree. As she zooms in and out from her own family to the entire American Indian assimilation project, she reminds us that there is no line between family history and national tragedies.
At first, Pember’s chilling history seems to only take aim at familiar evils: white supremacy, Christian nationalism, or racial paternalism.
But the subterranean evil that persists through the several generations of Pember’s book is more insidious: it’s the ideal of American progress. In her history of white attitudes toward Native Americans, Pember points to Thomas Jefferson’s view that white civilization was part of the inevitable “progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.” Later on, Progressive boarding school advocates thought assimilation was a humane way to bring Native Americans aboard the runaway train of American prosperity.
At an event in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1926, more than 8,000 Indians from different tribes gathered to celebrate the United States Indian Industrial Training School. Parade floats contrasted “Indians of the Past” in traditional dress with “Indians of the Present,” successful graduates of the school dressed as blacksmiths and electricians. The message was clear: “progress of the race” was hurtling along quite nicely.
Pember writes a strange and contradictory portrait of her mother’s adulthood–the flashbacks, the outbursts of anger and despair. She remembers her mother’s demands that they all “act white”–and her silent contempt when they started to pull it off. It all recalls the old Progressive adage to “kill the Indian, save the man.” If you kill the Indian’s language, spiritual practice, proximity to family, clothing, food, music, then what worth saving is left of the man? Is it only the ability to work?
The nuns at the Sister School railed against the “laziness” of Indian men, who would spend evenings sitting in community, enjoying each others’ company, rather than working into the night. “Labor is painful,” one Quaker educator explained. “Education and habit alone can reconcile [the Indian man] to it.”
A room full of Indian children, like an untouched forest of trees, looked just like untapped potential for the “settler” culture and economy. America’s booming years were due to innovation and imagination, yes, but also an imagined infinity. Infinite natural resources, infinite cash, infinite eager workers. Everyone seems to agree–these years are over.
Soon, we will have nothing left to sacrifice to the American god of progress. No more forests to raze, no more land to suck dry of oil, the people all wrung of their potential. Then the progress might reveal itself to have been just aimless expansion. What then?
Bernice Pember, the author’s mother. (Photo courtesy of Mary Annette Pember)
Bernice Pember died in 2011 at the age of 86. Mary Annette Pember’s book does not indicate that she has transcended the pain and anger of her family or the oppression of thousands of Indians in the name of Americanism. In writing the book, Pember chose to surround herself with that pain – in the documents of Indian boarding school archives, in interviews with survivors and relatives, in her own citizenship in the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe. And she chose to share it so readers can at least glimpse its impact.
At the annual Bad River Manoomin Harvest festival and powwow, Pember danced with other Ojibwe women. “The drum was loud and the arbor was well shaded,” she recalls, “beyond which I could see the birch and poplar trees that had survived their own genocide and grew straight and tall.”
Christiana Wayne is the Daily Yonder’s assistant news editor.
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