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Mary Annette Pember, a journalist, wife and mother from Anderson Township, a place that only several years ago hosted raucous debates about the use of their racist high school mascot, decided she must go on a quest, for her mom, her ancestors but most importantly herself, wondering about the historical trauma passed on through America’s first inhabitants.

You see, Pember isn’t just a homemaker in a tidy neighborhood where housing prices are high. She’s first an Ojibwe woman of the Red Cliff Band of the Wisconsin Ojibwe, people who occupy the area near Gitche Gumee, the “huge water” that White settlers later named Lake Superior. But she’s also a working professional writer specializing in stories about Indigenous people. She works for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. But one of her first jobs out of the University of Wisconsin was as a photographer with the Cincinnati Enquirer. 

But just several weeks ago, Pantheon Books, released her Medicine River, “A Story of Survival And The Legacy Of Indian Boarding Schools,” a deeply researched, but personal, account of the impact of life at such schools that dotted the United States from 1870 to 1930, usually run by religious groups that at times beat the Indian out of the people White colonialists saw as impediments to their conquering march across country.    

The story is personal to Pember because her mother Bernice, along with her siblings, spent years living full time at St. Mary’s, near their reservation, given up by her divorced parents to Catholic nuns so strict and heartless that her mom carried lifelong scars from her eight years of being raised in fear and loneliness. 

Sadly, her mom’s story isn’t unique. Nearly 80% of Native children attended the nearly 500 schools across the country at that time. And work has recently begun to study how many of them may be secretly buried there from deaths like untreated disease, accidents and abuse. In Canada, they’ve begun reparations, apologies and policy changes. And in 2022, Pope Francis visited Canada to express sorrow for the Catholic Church’s part in the horror.

Pember’s book has received enthusiastic reviews from the New York Times, The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. And it’s no wonder. It flows through her personal memories of often painful interactions with her mom she felt were residues of her mistreatment at St. Mary’s, interviews with other boarding school survivors, extended family, researchers and Native American activists. There’s even an interview with Jodine Grundy, a politically active Caucasian from Cincinnati who in 1966 worked for several months at a similar boarding school in the state of Washington, but resigned because of evil she sensed was active there.

I first met Mary Annette Pember in the late 1990s when we both spoke out against Anderson High School’s use of the nickname “Redskins.” And in 1966 and 1967, I was a Vista volunteer for several months on an Ojibwe Reservation in Northern Minnesota. So I squirmed a bit reading her book, because it exposes strategies White people used to assimilate, relocate, in some cases even terminate native people. Even well meaning do gooders like me come across as self righteous annoyances at times. I recalled the time I sat in Axel Holmes’ small reservation dwelling near the wild rice Nett Lake watching the Minnesota Vikings Sunday football game. Axel was a weathered looking elder of the tribe who could see that I was struggling with the bone chilling temperatures, culture shock and bewilderment as to how to truly help anyone from his tribe. During a lull in the action, he sort of side glanced at me and said, “Don’t worry, Jene. I’ll help you get through this.” That said it all about my naive I-can-heal-the-world cockiness, no matter how well intentioned. 

Pember ends her book, a clearly cathartic journey, describing her sewing a ceremonial Jingle Dress, with streams of pieces of metal that explode in sound during dance movements, and she herself danced in that dress at a recent Bad River Powwow in memory of her deceased mother. The quest was done, The story told. Now it’s up to the rest of us to learn from it.