Latest news with #MaryAnnettePember
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The devastating legacy of Native boarding schools: ‘no way people can apologize it away'
Mary Annette Pember will publish her first book, Medicine River, on Tuesday. She signed to write it in 2022 but feels she really started work more than 50 years ago, 'before I could even write, when I was under the table as a kid, making these symbols that were sort of my own'. A citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, Pember is a national correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. In Medicine River, she tells two stories: of the Indian boarding schools, which operated in the US between the 1860s and the 1960s, and of her mother, her time in such a school and the toll it took. 'My mother kind of put me on this quest from my earliest memory,' Pember said. 'I've always known I would somehow tell her story.' Related: 'We're still here': past and present collide at a Native American boarding school More than 400 Indian boarding schools operated on US soil. Vehicles for policies of assimilation, perhaps better described as cultural annihilation, the schools were brutal by design. Children were not allowed to speak their own language or practice religions and traditions. Discipline was harsh, comforts scarce. As described by Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer and champion of the project, the aim was to 'kill the Indian in him, and save the man'. In the 1930s, Pember's mother, Bernice Rabideaux, was sent with her siblings to St Mary's Catholic Indian boarding school, on the Ojibwe reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin. Bernice was marked for life. On the page, Pember describes how as a young child she responded to her mother's dark moods by hiding under the kitchen table, making her symbols on its underside. But she also writes about how her mother's 'terrible stories' about the 'Sisters School', about psychological and physical abuse, helped form a bond that never broke. Pember kept writing. A troubled child, she 'sharpened a lead pencil into a dagger-like point and wrote microscopic messages and insults to my family on the wall next to the stairs' of the family home in Chicago. Later, she became a reporter. 'Writing is so visceral for me,' she said. 'I still like writing with a really sharp pencil, I like the sound of it in my notebooks, and I keep them with me all the time. It always hits me when I'm really tired, and the last thing I want to do is write things down, and that's when I have to do it … It's just such a part of me, I don't question it. 'There was a lot of drama in my house. All these things were going on. Of course, they weren't explained to me. They would sort of lower their voices if they knew I was around. And I just hated being an outsider. I wanted to know what was going on.' Medicine River is an attempt to explain. If recent years have seen a shift in US awareness of the boarding schools and their legacy, that is in large part due to events in Canada, where discoveries of unmarked graves at sites of such institutions prompted a national reckoning of sorts. 'We were the model from which Canada drew,' Pember said. 'We predated them by quite some time, and we had far more schools. It had an impact on a far greater number of children. But for some reason we just remain stubbornly ignorant of it here in the United States. They were horrible places in which children were brutalized. And of course it wasn't just the schools. The schools were part of a greater federal assimilationist agenda. 'If they had just done the schools to us, it would not have been so bad. But I always think of it as this triple whammy that happened to Native people in the 19th century. It was removal [forced relocation west], then allotment [dividing lands collectively held], then taking the kids away. It was a concerted attack on our culture, our language and our holdings. That was what it was really about. They wanted our land. 'The public was averse to outright extermination, so it was framed as a humanitarian policy. I think it is really important to view boarding schools in that context.' Pember's investigations led her to dark places. Noting that in other spheres, the Catholic church has been forced to reckon with sexual abuse by priests, she said a moment of truth regarding Native boarding schools may yet come – while pointing to milestones already passed including reporting by Dana Hedgpeth and others for the Washington Post, a class-action lawsuit in western states, and the revelation of brutal events in Alaska. 'Native people were not really viewed as actually human,' Pember said. 'One of the surprising things I learned in researching the book, was the power of the eugenics movement. I mean, this was not peripheral hogwash. They were teaching this at Harvard. The leaders of the era … supported this whole notion of eugenics. They were using phrases like 'the final solution'. They stopped short of advocating euthanasia but there were 30 states that allowed involuntary sterilization of people who were considered feeble-minded or in some way racially inferior … I had not realized how foundational that was, to the way the relationship between the federal government and Native people evolved.' For Pember, publication day will not be without a certain irony. As Medicine River was written, the federal government finally engaged, to some extent, with the Indian boarding schools and their lasting harms. Last year brought an investigative report, identifying at least 973 student deaths (the Post found more than 3,100), and a presidential apology, delivered by Joe Biden alongside Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous secretary of the interior. But as Medicine River comes out, Donald Trump is back, assaulting federal agencies with staffing and budget cuts, seeking to obliterate recognition of the US's racist past. 'Things are so wild and uncertain,' Pember said. 'We're all just being pulled back and forth, every single day. 'We're still trying to figure out the impact of these things [Trump has] done, because Indian country runs on all of these disparate grants from agencies … the US Department of Agriculture gives so many grants to Indian country, for example, and then there's various sub-agencies and organizations within that. Unlike mainstream America, we have no tax base, and so we don't really have good, sustainable infrastructure. So we're trying to piece it together. '[In] the Bad River tribe, where my mom is from, the librarian is gone now. She lost her funding, under some real obscure agency. And that was so sad. They just recently got it, and they were really feeling they were sitting pretty, and now that's gone.' Hope remains. The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act, a bipartisan measure introduced in 2021, is not dead yet. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican senator more independent-minded than most, has taken it up. Pember noted that if such a commission is formed, it will not have subpoena power, perhaps necessary for co-operation from the Catholic church. Pember is determined to keep the Indian boarding schools in the public eye. 'The goal is to record as much as possible the stories that people have,' she said. 'To say: 'Yes, this happened to you. Let's document this.'' Describing research at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, she said: 'The big thing is to make these records available to people. I can tell you how powerful it is just to see your relative's name printed. To see my mom's name and my uncles and aunts and my grandmother and grandfather, to see their names on these rosters … was just something really powerful. It said: 'This happened, and there's no workaround. There's no way people can apologize it away. This did happen.' That's uniquely powerful.'
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Things to do in Green Bay this weekend: Run for the Roses Wine Walk, Titletown Train Show
There may not be as much excitement in Green Bay this weekend now that the NFL draft is over, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything going on. Here are some events happening in the Green Bay area this weekend. Dress in your best Kentucky Derby outfits for the Run for the Roses Wine Walk in the Broadway District. Check out 20 wine stops with light samples. The walk is 1-5 p.m. May 3. Tickets are $39-$45 on Eventbrite. Check out over 35,000 square feet of trains with demonstration and activities at the Titletown Train Show. The train show is 9 a.m.-5 p.m. May 3 and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. May 4 at the KI Convention Center in downtown Green Bay. Admission is $2-$8. More information is at The "Washed Ashore: Art to Save the Sea" exhibit returns to the Green Bay Botanical Garden this weekend. It opens May 2. The national traveling exhibit spotlights larger-than-life art made from plastic garbage to highlight plastic pollution. Daily admission to the botanical garden is $15 for adults, $13 for students, and $5 for kids. More information is at Mary Annette Pember, the author of "Medicine River," about the history of Native American boarding schools, is coming to the Brown County Central Library. Her presentation will include a book signing and meet-and-greet. Some copies of the book will be available for purchase. The event is at 1 p.m. May 3. More information is at Contact Benita Mathew at bmathew@ This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Things to do in Green Bay this weekend
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'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. Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
21-04-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
‘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. 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. 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.
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The devastating legacy of Native boarding schools: ‘no way people can apologize it away'
Mary Annette Pember will publish her first book, Medicine River, on Tuesday. She signed to write it in 2022 but feels she really started work more than 50 years ago, 'before I could even write, when I was under the table as a kid, making these symbols that were sort of my own'. A citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, Pember is a national correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. In Medicine River, she tells two stories: of the Indian boarding schools, which operated in the US between the 1860s and the 1960s, and of her mother, her time in such a school and the toll it took. 'My mother kind of put me on this quest from my earliest memory,' Pember said. 'I've always known I would somehow tell her story.' More than 400 Indian boarding schools operated on US soil. Vehicles for policies of assimilation, perhaps better described as cultural annihilation, the schools were brutal by design. Children were not allowed to speak their own language or practice religions and traditions. Discipline was harsh, comforts scarce. As described by Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer and champion of the project, the aim was to 'kill the Indian in him, and save the man'. In the 1930s, Pember's mother, Bernice Rabideaux, was sent with her siblings to St Mary's Catholic Indian boarding school, on the Ojibwe reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin. Bernice was marked for life. On the page, Pember describes how as a young child she responded to her mother's dark moods by hiding under the kitchen table, making her symbols on its underside. But she also writes about how her mother's 'terrible stories' about the 'Sisters School', about psychological and physical abuse, helped form a bond that never broke. Pember kept writing. A troubled child, she 'sharpened a lead pencil into a dagger-like point and wrote microscopic messages and insults to my family on the wall next to the stairs' of the family home in Chicago. Later, she became a reporter. 'Writing is so visceral for me,' she said. 'I still like writing with a really sharp pencil, I like the sound of it in my notebooks, and I keep them with me all the time. It always hits me when I'm really tired, and the last thing I want to do is write things down, and that's when I have to do it … It's just such a part of me, I don't question it. 'There was a lot of drama in my house. All these things were going on. Of course, they weren't explained to me. They would sort of lower their voices if they knew I was around. And I just hated being an outsider. I wanted to know what was going on.' Medicine River is an attempt to explain. To most, its story will be unfamiliar. If recent years have seen a shift in US awareness of the boarding schools and their legacy, that is in large part due to events in Canada, where discoveries of unmarked graves at sites of such institutions prompted a national reckoning of sorts. 'We were the model from which Canada drew,' Pember said. 'We predated them by quite some time, and we had far more schools. It had an impact on a far greater number of children. But for some reason we just remain stubbornly ignorant of it here in the United States. They were horrible places in which children were brutalized. And of course it wasn't just the schools. The schools were part of a greater federal assimilationist agenda. 'If they had just done the schools to us, it would not have been so bad. But I always think of it as this triple whammy that happened to Native people in the 19th century. It was removal [forced relocation west], then allotment [dividing lands collectively held], then taking the kids away. It was a concerted attack on our culture, our language and our holdings. That was what it was really about. They wanted our land. 'The public was averse to outright extermination, so it was framed as a humanitarian policy. I think it is really important to view boarding schools in that context.' Pember's investigations led her to dark places. Noting that in other spheres the Catholic church has been forced to reckon with sexual abuse by priests, she said a moment of truth regarding Native boarding schools may yet come – while pointing to milestones already passed including reporting by Dana Hedgpeth and others for the Washington Post, a class action lawsuit in western states, and similar events in Alaska. 'Native people were not really viewed as actually human,' Pember said. 'One of the surprising things I learned in researching the book, was the power of the eugenics movement. I mean, this was not peripheral hogwash. They were teaching this at Harvard. The leaders of the era … supported this whole notion of eugenics. They were using phrases like 'the final solution'. They stopped short of advocating euthanasia but there were 30 states that allowed involuntary sterilization of people who were considered feeble-minded or in some way racially inferior … I had not realized how foundational that was, to the way the relationship between the federal government and Native people evolved.' For Pember, publication day will not be without a certain irony. As Medicine River was written, the federal government finally engaged, to some extent, with the Indian boarding schools and their lasting harms. Last year brought an investigative report, identifying at least 973 student deaths (the Post found more than 3,100), and a presidential apology, delivered by Joe Biden alongside Deb Haaland, the first indigenous secretary of the interior. But as Medicine River comes out, Donald Trump is back, assaulting federal agencies with staffing and budget cuts, seeking to obliterate recognition of America's racist past. Sign up to First Thing Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion 'Things are so wild and uncertain,' Pember said. 'We're all just being pulled back and forth, every single day. 'We're still trying to figure out the impact of these things [Trump has] done, because Indian country runs on all of these disparate grants from agencies … the US Department of Agriculture gives so many grants to Indian country, for example, and then there's various sub-agencies and organizations within that. Unlike mainstream America, we have no tax base, and so we don't really have good, sustainable infrastructure. So we're trying to piece it together. 'I[n] the Bad River tribe, where my mom is from, the librarian is gone now. She lost her funding, under some real obscure agency. And that was so sad. They just recently got it, and they were really feeling they were sitting pretty, and now that's gone.' Hope remains. The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act, a bipartisan measure introduced in 2021, is not dead yet. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican senator more independent-minded than most, has taken it up. Pember noted that if such a commission is formed, it will not have subpoena power, perhaps necessary for co-operation from the Catholic church. Pember is determined to keep the Indian boarding schools in the public eye. 'The goal is to record as much as possible the stories that people have,' she said. 'To say, 'Yes, this happened to you. Let's document this.'' Describing research at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, she said: 'The big thing is to make these records available to people. I can tell you how powerful it is just see your relative's name printed. To see my mom's name and my uncles and aunts and my grandmother and grandfather, to see their names on these rosters … was just something really powerful. It said: 'This happened, and there's no workaround. There's no way people can apologize it away. This did happen.' That's uniquely powerful.' Medicine River is out in the US on 22 April
