Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

Journalist Pember debuts with a devastating history of Indian boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada and the legacy of generational trauma they unleashed. Drawing on extensive archival research, Pember traces how over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Christian mission to convert, “civilize,” and assimilate Indigenous people came to focus its efforts on children, with the explicit aim to “disrupt family ties.” (“Enforced attendance at school can... exempt the children from the debasing influences” of families who refused Christian conversion, noted one Catholic missionary in 1889.) At the schools, the children suffered abuse, neglect, and, significantly for Pember’s story, a total lack of loving care from the adults around them, which was replaced with incessant racial denigration and exhortations to be better than their origins. Weaving into her narrative her own mother’s experiences in a Catholic-run boarding school in Wisconsin, Pember explores the psychological ramifications the schools had on subsequent generations. She comes to many quietly ruinous insights about the emotional neglect she herself suffered at the hands of her wounded mother (“I am an observer, often an annoyance, who tears her away from tending her obsessions—her ghosts and her secrets—with my needs”). Concluding with a searing call for accountability, this strikes a chord. (Apr.)