Latest news with #Pember
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.'
New York Times
03-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
An Ojibwe Writer Refuses to Let Her Mother's Trauma Be in Vain
Alone as a child tucked in at night, Mary Annette Pember had visions. 'Strings of lights, rather like phosphorescent snakes,' she writes, would float along the ceiling of her bedroom, turning and twisting in the dark. When she asked what the strange lights could be, her mother, an Ojibwe from northern Wisconsin, urged her not to be afraid: They want to protect you; they won't hurt you, but don't ever tell anyone else you see them. Her mother knew what it took to survive. Sometimes that meant looking with eyes wide open in the dark. Pember's affecting new book, 'Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools,' does just that. Full of unvarnished anguish, it's both a solemn history of the pervasive abuse of Native children in federal boarding schools and a visceral family memoir about Pember's mother, Bernice Rabideaux, a traumatized Ojibwe child who emerged a strong but suffering Ojibwe woman. Beginning in the 1860s and over the next hundred years, many Native children across the country were forced to attend Indian boarding schools, often run by the Catholic Church, as a means of assimilation. There they regularly endured humiliation, violence, deprivation and sometimes death, devastating their lives and their families. Bernice Rabideaux was one such child, who, from the age of 5 through adolescence. attended St. Mary's Catholic Indian Mission School, or 'Sister School,' on the Bad River reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin. According to the book, the experience created an intractable conflict between white Christian settler values and her Ojibwe values of community and environmental stewardship. She died in 2011 at the age of 86. Pember, who moved here to work at the Cincinnati Enquirer, is the former president of the Native American Journalists' Association and a freelance writer. Talking about 'Medicine River' recently at her home in a quiet Cincinnati neighborhood, she exuded wary authority. Asked about coming to terms with a parent coming to terms with trauma, she demurred. Her mother, she said, 'never really thought of herself as coming to terms with anything. I think she wanted to leave that behind, but you never could. It was just in there, in a sound or a smell or quality of light.' Rabideaux took great pride in her heritage, but coercive assimilation at the Sister School left a permanent mark, her daughter explained. 'The white world that we entered into, she was successful in it,' Pember said, 'but it was just so disappointing to her. There was just so little emotional and spiritual sustenance. I think that she really hungered for her origins.' David Treuer, the author of 'The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee' and an editor-at-large at Pantheon Books, which published 'Medicine River,' invoked the motto of second-wave feminism — 'the personal is political' — in framing Pember's blend of history and memoir. 'It was largely a matter of trying to see how the forces of history flowed through her mother's life and her life through their relationship — and being really attuned to the ways in which history flows through all of us,' he explained. The 2021 discovery of a mass grave holding the remains of 215 First Nations children on the site of a former residential school in Canada — over 4,000 First Nations children died in such schools — set in motion a historical reckoning there and in the United States. Deb Haaland, then the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to investigate the legacy of boarding school policies and to consider their intergenerational impact. After its report was released in 2024, President Biden issued a formal apology on behalf of the federal government. 'My goal has always been about healing,' Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, said in a recent interview. 'And I don't think you can heal from things unless you highlight them, unless you face them.' After high school, 19-year-old Bernice Rabideaux moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, where her four siblings lived. Soon enough she married Charles Gordon Pember, a kind and stable man. For a time she cleaned offices and worked at a factory canning vegetables. One of the offices was that of Leon Feingold, the father of former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold. The Feingolds would become lifelong friends, encouraging her fledgling political consciousness. She joined a Democratic women's organization and, in 1964, campaigned for Lyndon Johnson in his run for the presidency. Yet she was ambivalent about her life. She 'became a shape-shifter, transforming herself according to her surroundings,' Pember writes. 'On the one hand, she encouraged [her children] to conform to the white world, but at the same time she not so secretly despised us for trying.' When the family visited the reservation, it would take her mother time to settle in, Pember recalls in the book. Seeing Lake Superior, 'she would gaze out toward that perfect line between water and sky, her thin arms wrapped around herself; we could see she was home.' Still, her fragile peace couldn't last. For many former boarding school students like Rabideaux, the wounds of the flesh were the wounds of the soul. And when she worked herself into a rage, a young Pember felt the impact. 'I stood by helplessly; I said nothing,' she writes. 'I learned to be quiet. From my place under the table I secretly began constructing my own armor and defiance.' As an adult, Pember married, had a family and pursued a prolific career in journalism. She also suffered from alcoholism. As time went on, she sought out Ojibwe spiritual practices, which require sobriety for participation. After getting sober and with her life now rooted in her heritage, she felt a greater sense of serenity. Yet one challenge remained: to tell the story of her mother. 'It was like she gave me this baton,' Pember explained. 'She never overtly told me, but I just knew that I had to do it.' Starting in 1980, she began to write down her mother's first-person accounts of her school years and life on the reservation. She also spent more than 20 years researching Indian boarding schools in federal and Catholic church archives, along with conducting over 50 interviews, for what would come to be 'Medicine River.' It has provided Pember a sense of closure that her mother likely never attained. 'I honored her, her quest she sent me on,' she said. 'So I'm done with that now.'
New York Times
29-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Healing the Scars Left by America's Indian Boarding Schools
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.'
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.
