<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/medicine-river-book-native-boarding-schools>
"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.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
