Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools by Mary Annette Pember (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Nonfiction - History - Indigenous - Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs 

RELEASE DATE: 4/22/2025 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE AND ARRIVE 1-2 DAYS AFTER THE RELEASE DATE)

A sweeping and trenchant exploration of the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S., and the legacy of abuse wrought by systemic attempts to use education as a tool through which to destroy Native culture.

From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise "assimilate" into American life. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people.  Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection.

Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions—a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary'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 portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Mary Annette Pember is an independent journalist focusing on Native American issues. She has reported on the high rates of sexual assault experienced by Native women, sex trafficking, health, the impact of historical trauma on Native communities and environmental challenges on Native lands, federal policy issues, and cultural topics. Her work has appeared in Indian Country Today, ReWire News, Truthout, Yes! Magazine, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Colorlines, The Atlantic and others. She is past president of the Native American Journalists' Association and is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

"A dauntless and visceral excavation of one family's residential boarding school legacy. In Medicine River, we can see pain ripple through generations, eclipsed only by Mary Annette Pember's courage and her conviction that, in the search for answers, we can heal."
--Anton Treuer, author of Where Wolves Don't Die