'Medicine River' reckons with the legacy of Indian boarding schools — through a daughter's eyes
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.
Read more: Patt Morrison: Why the U.S. needed to apologize for its 'Indian school' policy
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.
Read more: A book that revealed the 'entire story' of Indian boarding schools would be important. This isn't it.
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.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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I consumed six burgers in the last seven days. One was wrapped in yellow paper on a restaurant patio in Eagle Rock that felt like a friend's backyard. Two were smash burgers with crunchy, lacy edges in a coffee shop in downtown El Segundo. I drove to Compton for double chili cheeseburgers. West to Santa Monica for a thick patty and east to South Pasadena. In total, I clocked 204 miles on my Prius in pursuit of an excellent burger. This is not something meant to elicit praise, surprise, disgust or a call from my gastroenterologist. It's what happens when I eat something spectacular, then fixate on it for days. Most of the time, that something spectacular becomes the subject of this column. The accidental burger quest began in the patio of Cannonball in South Pasadena, with a cool breeze on my cheeks and the sound of the A Line train whizzing by, its tracks just beyond the restaurant's perimeter. 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On top is a slice of cheese, cut at the restaurant to ensure the proper melt and ideal meat-to-cheese ratio. The inside of the egg brioche is toasted in canola oil, releasing the butter in the bread and forming a crisp, French-toast-like layer on the bun. Just the bottom half is smeared with Dijonnaise. There is no lettuce, tomato or onion; nothing to interfere with the glorious sensation of an aggressively fatty and salty homogeneous bite. In its fourth week of operation, there is already so much to fixate on at Cannonball. Molina's biscuits, flaky, tender and impeccable, also make an appearance on the menu. But the burger ($23), accompanied by a cylinder of uncomplicated French fries, is a great place to start. The thick patty reigns at Jeremy Fox's Santa Monica restaurant Birdie G's, with a heft that will require the full extension of your jaw. It's satisfyingly heavy in the hand, a burger that commands the attention of a full meal. 'I wanted it to be as special as possible, so we tested out a bunch of different cuts of beef,' Fox says. 'We do a lot of quality control and taste testing every day.' The Birdie Burger that appears on the menu is the 19th iteration. Fox landed on a blend of prime brisket and chuck, coarsely ground in house and formed into eight-ounce patties with a fat percentage that hovers around 25%. He seasons the meat with salt and the restaurant's own Montreal steak rub, with plenty of dried onion and garlic. It's a patty with the depth and marbling of a nice rib-eye, cooked over a blend of almond wood and charcoal. A slice of melted havarti envelops the meat in a creamy layer of mild, buttery cheese that hangs over the edges of the burger. Fox makes a condiment he dubs Al's steak sauce, named for his grandfather, who was fond of A1. With tamarind, Worcestershire and plenty of onions, the sauce helps coax out the wood smoke in the meat. A caramelized onion jam cooked down with Manischewitz wine is the right amount of sweet. Thinly sliced raw white onion and dill pickles bring the flavors into focus, ensuring nothing feels too heavy. It's a meat and cheese tower book-ended by a butter-toasted milk bread bun, made specifically for the restaurant by Petitgrain Boulangerie. 'Birdie G's was always the place that should have had a burger, we just never got around to it,' Fox says. 'It's our number-one seller. We really put a lot of love into it.' The burger is available on both the happy hour ($23) and dinner menus ($32 with fries), and also on the new brunch menu, that launches June 21. The burgers at Addy Pool's tiny walk-up counter in Compton are designed to taste like they came from her home kitchen. It's the way she learned how to make burgers when she started working at the now-closed Three Bears Burgers in Vermont Vista as an eager 19-year-old in the early '90s. 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'My bun goes straight on the grill, with no butter or anything,' she says. 'You have to be able to taste the seasoning in my meat.' Rather than a variation on Thousand Island, what's become the go-to spread for burgers across the city, Pool adds a dollop of hot pepper relish to her burgers. It's a condiment that adorned the burgers at both the Original Snack Shack and Three Bears Burgers. She's tweaked the recipe over the years, with the current version having a smidgen more heat. It's sweet but not overpowering, with both dill and sweet relish and a kick from crushed pepper flakes and chile paste. The double cheeseburger requires a commitment, prompting a likely nap shortly after. Thoughtfully and smartly constructed, she layers the first patty cheese side down on the bun, then a middle layer of lettuce, diced onion and relish (tomato if you ask, but I have feelings about tomato on a burger and didn't) in the middle, then the second patty, cheese side up. The construction guarantees even bites, with no spillage out the back. The double chili cheeseburger ($9.35) is less refined, the backyard burger of your dreams drowned in a savory chili seasoned with lots of black pepper, garlic and Pool's secret blend of spices. 'We make the chili and everything else every single day,' she says. 'We make the fries to order. Every product I have is fresh. I tell my customers that the only old thing in the kitchen is me.' Depending on the hour of day, you'll find a small group of Pool's family at the restaurant. During my last visit, two grandchildren were playing in the parking lot while her daughter and niece were in the kitchen. She also employs her son and nephew. 'In order to keep the prices down and keep the doors open, all my family have jobs and come help me,' she says. ' I want to make sure that everybody is able to buy a burger from me and not say it's too expensive.' 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