Many thanks to Pantheon Books and NetGalley for allowing me to review an advanced copy of Mary Annette Pember’s powerful book Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools. I am glad that more researchers, historians and journalists like Pember have started to excavate the hidden history of abuses and coercion that have occurred at Indian Boarding Schools during the 19th and 20th centuries. A few months ago, I read Eve Ewing’s incredible book Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of Americanism which challenges the notion of education as a means to social and economic mobility, and rather than viewing education as an equalizing force in society, Ewing recasts the ways that education was used to control and eradicate culture, operating under the assumptions of a cultural superiority that is still persistent today. It’s a powerful lesson and book that challenged my own ideas and hopes about education, yet also presented some ways that education can continue to grow and adapt to better teach Black and Native students. Medicine River focuses more specifically on Indian boarding schools, which were prominent throughout the 19th and even the 20th century, and explores their economic, social, and psychological legacy and the generations trauma that continues to haunt many Native families long after their ancestors attended these schools. Using her own mother’s experience in the Sister School in Wisconsin. Recalling discussions and stories from her Mother, Bernice, Pember begins to weave the story of these boarding schools with history, policy, and the tragedies that often were a continued part of these schools. While I initially thought this book would be mostly a focus on the history and legacies of the schools, Pember uses her mother’s experience, along with other subjects in the book, to examine the generational pain and emotional destruction that these schools have wrought on Native communities across the United States and Canada. She not only explores her mother’s story, but also interweaves her own experiences with school, exploring how her mother’s pain and abuse connected to Pember’s own eventual disconnection with school and her decision to run away from home in the 1970s. Pember’s story is one of redemption, and explores how she overcame these initial challenges to earn a college degree and a successful career in journalism, while also eventually becoming sober. The latter third of the book delves more into how traditional therapies and recovery efforts may not necessarily be culturally relevant to Native groups, who experience some of the highest rates of poverty and addiction in America. She presents the story of a Yup’ik community in Alaska that uses more traditional methods and encourages a sustenance lifestyle that their ancestors practiced to help members overcome addition and challenging mental health problems. Pember also revisits the painful last years of her mother’s life, while also continuing to weave together new revelations from her grandparents’ lives that she never realized due to her mother’s trauma. Medicine River is almost like 3 books in one—sharing some of the best qualities of memoir, historical analysis, and culturally relevant mental health practices. Although the book is challenging and features instances of violence, abuse, and the deaths of Native children, it’s an important reminder to recognize the kind of settler mentality and cultural supremacy that devised these schools and recognized them as a powerful state tool to not only eradicate Indigenous cultures across North America, but also as a means to weaken familial ties and gain land and access to minerals and resources like timber.
While I enjoyed the entirety of this book, I felt like Pember’s strongest points were when she was writing about the boarding schools and the history and policies that eventually brought them about. Like Ewing’s book, Pember delves into the policies that brought about these schools, and how politicians used them as a means of control and coercion, and to avoid the physical genocide by bringing about a cultural genocide, often repeating the phrase on which these schools operated “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Pember begins by researching the archives for these schools which are held at Marquette University. She shares how there is some hesitancy to allow her full access, and her initial experience with the archives did not really provide that much illuminating evidence. However, her later research explores many of the horrors that children and their families experienced, from forcing the children into these schools with threats and legal action to the forced assimilation towards White Christianity. In what is some of the most harrowing research presented, Pember explores how illnesses which were typically deadly in the 19th and early 20th century, like measles, tuberculosis, and the flu, were often passed to Native children, who were then sent home to further spread these illnesses within their communities. Pember documents various cases of young children, infected with disease, and often returning home to die. In other cases, she explores how families were often notified after burial of their children’s passing. It’s heartbreaking and shocking to learn that while these schools were supposed to provide care and education for Native children, they were often sites of cultural and physical violence, sometimes even resulting in death. Pember, through her own family’s experiences, details the long-lasting effects of this kind of abuse and pain, and how families often pass down the emotional pain from generation to generation. I learned so much from these chapters, and Pember’s detailed research and fact-finding helped to add even more depth and significance to the research presented in Ewing’s book.
Pember then transitions into her own story, which is both fascinating and tragic, yet ultimately redemptive and hopeful. It was interesting to learn about her mother’s experiences once she left the Sisters School, but then how Pember first met her grandfather, who plays an important role in the later story, once Pember learns more about how her mother eventually ended up in the Sisters School. Pember shares her own experiences in school, and the kind of racism and discrimination she faced in schools, leading her to eventually leave and run away. This part of the book was surprising, not only for Pember’s adventures as a runaway, but also as to the candor and bravery for telling her story. I wasn’t expecting this part of the book, and it was fascinating to learn more about her background and experiences. I think this aspect of her story also shows the kind of generational trauma or how the unresolved pain and anguish can be passed along from mother to daughter. It’s an important message about acknowledging the pain and hurt once experiences to move beyond it and ensure that we don’t subject our children to the same kind of pain and hurt we experienced as children. Pember’s story is also hopeful since she explores how she eventually returned from juvenile incarceration to attend University of Wisconsin and earn a degree in journalism. Although she doesn’t get too into the details of her alcoholism, she discusses her initial career as a journalist, and how it kind of enabled her drinking further. However, in returning to the idea of generational trauma, Pember experiences waking up from a drunken night on a bathroom with her daughter staring at her. This was her moment of clarity, when she recognized that she didn’t want to inflict the same pain and hurt that she experienced on her daughter. It’s a powerful lesson to learn, and sadly one that Pember’s mother, Bernice, continued to struggle with throughout her life.
The latter part of the book deals more with overcoming this kind of trauma and the acknowledgement of the destruction and damage done by these boarding schools. The focus isn’t completely on the schools themselves, but rather many of the health and mental health challenges that Native communities face in America and Canada today. One of the most powerful sections focuses on Pember’s journey to Alaska to meet with a Yup’ik community that is burying a young man who was murdered by his niece, over an argument that no one is really sure how it began. This was also an important part of the book since Pember explains how often the traditional therapeutic practices for dealing with mental health issues aren’t always relevant and don’t always work for Indigenous peoples. I found this idea to be similar to educational researchers like Gloria Ladson Billings and Lisa Delpit who argue that in order for learning to be meaningful for groups of students, it needs to relevant and aligned with their own cultural values and experiences. Similarly, Pember’s revelation about the inefficacy of these practices also reminded me of Alisha McCullough’s book Reclaiming the Black Body: Nourishing the Home Within, where she explores how Western and White concepts of body image and nutrition are often ineffective and sometimes unhealthy for people of color. It’s an important reminder about how the kind of ethnocentricity continues to permeate and cause problems by failing to acknowledge cultural differences and preferences. Furthermore, I think Pember’s analysis and exploration of culturally relevant practices is an important reminder of the how necessary it is to acknowledge and include diversity in our education, practices, and considerations. The continued war against diversity can have devasting and lethal consequences for those communities that continue to face challenges and hardships, while also facing a denial of their practices, values, and beliefs. Another chapter follows the revelations about the abuse and deaths in Canadian boarding schools, and how despite acknowledgement and pledges from the government, many of the First Nations People are still waiting for reparations. I also found it interesting how Canadian politicians and even the Pope acknowledged, but also hedged their responsibilities and roles in the abuse, often blaming things like the doctrine of discovery or a colonial mentality that people were following at the time. Pember presents Canada’s actions as both a kind of blueprint for what to do and what not to do. She also outlines how Deb Haaland, the former Secretary of the Interior, helped to lead an investigation into the abuses in American Indian Boarding Schools. While I’m not hopeful that much will come of these investigations now with a change in the regime that seems to care nothing about history or Indigenous peoples, it’s still important to see what kinds of action have been taking place and how this may lead to change or further investigations in the future. Furthermore, Pember’s book will also serve as an important document that explores not just the events themselves, but the continued legacy and challenges that many descendants of boarding school survivors face. The last chapter also details Bernice’s later years and death, and how Pember was able to eventually learn more about her mother’s life and how she ended up at the Sister’s school. It was different from her mother’s memory, and this chapter served as an interesting way to recognize how the pain and trauma can often cloud our perception of the past, causing us to re-evaluate who was at fault and who we may look to for protection. Although the book was filled with pain and tragedy, Pember does end on a hopeful note, acknowledging her own experience as one of hope and resilience, but also acknowledging that there is still more work and healing to be done. I loved how she used her experience of the jingle dress, a traditional Ojibwe practice for healing, to emphasize the importance of culture to healing and moving on. This is a great book with a powerful message and exploration of both personal experience and its connection to larger events in American history.

"Medicine River" by Mary Annette Pember is a historically significant subject matter with intense material. This is an important part of history that has been intentionally forgotten or swept under the rug. I enjoyed the facts about this book. It was a bit difficult to read at times due to the very factual writing style.

The content of what this book covers warrants a high-star rating as it fits within the pantheon of history that we were not taught in our US public schools. It’s also a very personal story of the author’s family history and trauma- passed on inter-generationally.
However I found it difficult to read stylistically. There were parts written in a narrative non-fiction style that were engaging and engrossing. But much is written more like an academic research paper with facts, figures, resources written into the storyline…these aspects bogged the book down.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

Wow. This is a really important book. I appreciated the author's personal ties and passion for the subject at hand. I was informed and saddened at the same time. It really is astonishing sometimes about things that occur that if it doesn't closely involve us, we don't have any idea about. This is something to be outraged about! Thank you for opening my eyes to this atrocity and how people were treated.

This is a book that people everywhere should pick up and read. It is an intensely personal work for the author, and the care she takes in weaving family history together with documented facts and first hand accounts is astounding. There were, however, times when I wished more information would have been used from other boarding schools to support and expand on the information given. That being said, this is focused on the Bad River school. Mary Annette Pember's family history, in the case of Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada, is not as unique as we would hope for it to be. It is a huge part of thousands of families that continues to echo through our communities today.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This was a well done book, but over a very difficult topic. I can't say that I enjoyed reading this, but I think it was important to do so. At times, the chapters felt very dense, which made the pace feel so slow. With all of that information, sometimes I got confused with the timeline, and I am unsure if that's a reader issue or an issue with the structure of the chapters. Regardless, this was overall done well.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for a copy of this ARC.

(I received a copy of Medicine River through NetGalley and Pantheon in exchange for an honest review.)

The story Mary Annette Pember has to tell isn't an easy one to read. It can't have been easy for her to write. As much as it is a story that she needed to write, it is a story that needs to be read, told, and understood so that, to paraphase the cliche in the study of history, what happened does not happen again.

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools is the memoir of the author, the biography of her mother, the history of her family, and the story of the wider community of Native Americans who endured the boarding schools that the US government and the (mainly Catholic) churches demanded of them. And the balance between all of those parts is just right.

Having read various articles and seen reports on the boarding schools and their dark legacy, I didn't come to this story without some background knowledge. In fact, I thought I knew things. Whether Medicine River corrected things or simply challenged me to understand them on a deeper level, it changed how I see it all.

I'd heard of the 'smallpox blankets' that were possibly used intentionally to attempt to wipe out tribes in the Midwest. I hadn't known that the US government and the Catholic Church more or less arranged for tuberculosis to ravage the tribes - by sending sick children home to die so their deaths wouldn't be on school records and be allowing nuns to teach while sick, and blaming the sickness in the tribes on their 'dirty, unChristian lives.'

It wasn't really surprising that starvation and physical abuse were used as punishments and teaching moments. I wish it were surprising that the abuse was often doled out for things like children speaking their native languages or calling each other by their tribal names.

The underlying lesson taught by the schools seemed to be that the only correct answer was to be white and to be Christian.

And since that was impossible, the students paid the price in ways that still reverberate through their communities to this day.

When the author laid out what Pope Francis said in his apology for the Catholic schools in Canada, what Canada is doing to acknowledge it's own dark history with their residential schools, and what Deb Haaland (Secretary of the Interior under President Biden) spearheaded in America... it all should be more, mostly because it should never have happened, but at least it's something.

We can only hope that the current American administration and future administrations carry on what Secretary Haaland started.

It should be obvious that I haven't mentioned the memoir/family history aspect of this book - and I don't feel comfortable doing that. As a white woman, born in a different era than the author, I will simply say that it is a story that needs to be heard and the best person to tell it is Mary Annette Pember.

Thanks to the publisher for this ARC.
This was a hard book to read. The author takes on her own family history as a Native family affected by the forced education of members, especially her mother, at Indian boarding schools. She spends a lot of time on the history of the boarding schools and how they affected their students, and lots of time on her mother's trauma and how it affected her own life also. Some chapters are dense with information and some are dealing with her own family. This is an important book and I enjoyed it. I did feel that it has some continuity issues especially in the personal story chapters. But it was still a very worthwhile read.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available April 2025

Whst I loved the most about Mary Annette Pember's Medicine River is the way she was able to tell a story that was at once a personal ancedote and the story of Native people. Pember skillfully weaves in history, science, religion, and policy to demonstrate the complex legacies of Indian boarding schools in North America, using her own mother's experiences as an anchor. Have a box of tissues ready because you will cry and maybe even want to throw up at the grotesque violence young Native children face (much of which remains unacknowledged in American history books). A necessary read for all those living on Turtle Island.

MEDICINE RIVER by Mary Annette Pember is a powerful, heartbreaking, and profoundly impactful book that delves into the devastating legacy of Native American boarding schools in the United States. From the mid-19th century to the 1930s, the US government funded the boarding schools, half of which were run by Catholic missionary groups, to ‘help’ Native children assimilate into the American ‘civilization’ - today there are still 90 in operation (although with tribal leaders leading administrations).

Drawing from her Ojibwe heritage, Mary Annette Pember provides an authentic and essential Indigenous perspective. With her background in journalism, her writing style is very accessible. With meticulous research and attention to detail, Pember details systemic abuse and cultural erasure and explores the long-lasting effects of boarding school experiences. She highlights how trauma has been passed down through families, giving voice to the experiences of boarding school survivors.

I extend my gratitude to Netgalley, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing the digital advance review copy. I also want to express my appreciation to Mary Annette Pember for her invaluable contribution to our understanding of Native American history and the enduring impact of historical trauma. Her work in 'Medicine River' is a crucial and essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of this complex and often overlooked aspect of American history.

Those who have no prior knowledge of United States relations and policy towards and with Native American nations might think of boarding schools as existing only in the distant past- an anachronism of the days of the Founding Fathers, Jacksonian Indian removal, and the Indian Wars of the Great Plains. But what the author, Mary Annette Pember, so clearly illuminates to the general public is the present-day and intergenerational impact these institutions, of which there are still 90 in operation today (though with tribal leaders leading administrations), have in light of the recent discovery of a score of unmarked graves in Canada, as well as the United States reckoning, response, and resolution to its own history of boarding school.

Medicine River is a thought provoking, heartfelt, and deeply necessary story of the history and legacy of boarding schools through the eyes of an indigenous woman who’s mother and maternal grandmother endured the abuse and injustice at the hands of Christian missionary run boarding schools; it is equal parts history lesson and memoir. The book progresses mostly chronologically with interspersed interjections linking the past to the present. The interjections are occasionally chaotic, requiring the reader to go back a few pages to restitch the narrative, but the author covers a lot of history. Her earlier chapters offer history lessons, laying the groundwork for how these institutions came into being, starting as far back as the 15th/16th century. In the later chapters, the author focuses more on her personal relationships, with herself, and with the world she lives in. In this way it reads less like historical scholarship, i.e something happening in the past, to present-day analysis.

Likely due in part to the author’s background in journalism, the writing style is very accessible and in many parts conversational, when she retells stories from her mother’s past and through her interviews with individuals associated with boarding schools. Additionally, you don’t need to have any prior history or knowledge of Native American history, social issues, or even science…. If your forte is the former then you will appreciate her straightforward and palatable explanation of the neuroscience of trauma.

This book fits into a larger and currently ongoing discussion about the impact of boarding schools and Native American policy more broadly. Finally, Native communities are receiving acknowledgement from these institutions- the Federal governments of the United States and Canada, and the Catholic church- who perpetrated these injustices. I was drawn to this book as someone with a greater understanding of Native American history, however I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that is less knowledgeable about this history and also seeks to be in conversation with the current political restitutions.

This is my first feedback submitted to NetGalley; I appreciate the opportunity to submit my thoughts and hope that it helps the publisher, author, and others in their future endeavors.

I recently watched the documentary Sugarcane, and that was my first time learning about Indian boarding schools. I was horrified about what had taken place in our not so distant past. When I saw this book available as an ARC I immediately requested it, anxious to learn more.

This book and the stories within are so important. I was enthralled the whole time I was reading it. I thought the author did a great job of telling Native American history and the history of Indian boarding schools, as well as telling her own story and that of her family. Her mother went to an Indian boarding school so she had first hand stories of the experience, but she also did research to try to find the facts of the time. The way the author wove her stories into the factual history was truly beautiful. My only wish is that we could’ve gone more in-depth on several topics.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest rating and review.

Medicine River tells a sad truth that maybe not everyone knows about. Native American children were forced to attend schools where their identities were stripped. These children were forced to speak English, given English names and punished if they did not assimilate. Many children ran away and died. I was saddened and filled with anger when I read that a lot of these cases were brushed under the rug until the 2000's. I would re read this.

A lot to unpack here. The book was interesting. I have been interested in learning more about the Indian boarding schools and what went on in them.
While we did learn some information on that, I felt that there was a lot of the novel devoted to personal dealings and family trauma. I know it ties back to the boarding school however I felt it was just extra information that I didn’t really need. I wanted to learn more about the schools and how they were run instead of the entire story of the authors family.

I would definitely read this book. Unfortunately, timing I was unable to do so when I had access to the galley. We should support our indigenous people, as we are the original illegal immigrants.

I am not a fan of critiquing books where the story is so personal and visceral to the author. In the case of Medicine River by Mary Annette Pember, the specter of horrific abuse at Native American boarding schools permeates the entire narrative. It is certainly not a question if the abuse and cultural erasure occurred; it certainly did. However, I wish Pember chose to focus on one aspect instead of trying to cover multiple aspects of the story in a very short page count.

Pember frames the story around her relationship with her mother. Her mother was sent to a seminary in Wisconsin and it was as bad as you would expect. However, Pember will also go off on tangents mid-chapter to cover sometimes hundreds of years of history. These tangents are often oversimplified or littered with unsupported claims. She will then veer back to her mother's story or sprinkle the text with random acts of abuse to other people. It means the reader is caught playing catch up (or is distracted by random history summaries) instead of being able to fully comprehend the horrors these Native children suffered. In trying to have both a broader story-line mixed with a personal one, the reader is left with not enough of either.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and the publisher.)

"Medicine River" by Mary Pember offers a powerful exploration of the traumatic legacy of Native American boarding schools, deftly weaving together personal narratives and historical evidence to illuminate the enduring impacts of forced assimilation on Native communities. Through the lens of her mother’s harrowing experiences, Pember delves into the deep psychological scars inflicted on individuals and families, revealing how these institutions sought to erase cultural identities while creating a painful rift in familial relationships. The book serves as both a poignant remembrance and a call to acknowledge the resilience of Native cultures as they navigate the challenges of this dark chapter in American history, ultimately portraying a story of survival, recovery, and hope amidst the ongoing struggle against systemic oppression.

This was my last read for 2024, and what an impactful one it turned out to be. Mary Annette Pember is a journalist and a member of the Ojibwe tribe, and “Medicine River” is her debut work detailing the blighted legacy of the boarding schools for Native children in the US & Canada.

From the mid-19th century to the 1930s, the US government have funded the boarding schools, almost half of which were run by Catholic missionary groups, in order to ‘help’ Native children assimilate into the brave new world that is American ‘civilization’. Using the US’s concept as a blueprint, Canada had followed suit and established their own Native boarding schools. What went on within these schools were mostly left buried in the past, and it wasn’t until a burial site filled with Native children was unearthed at one of the Canadian boarding schools that the dark history of the US & Canada’s ‘founding’ was finally exposed.

Part memoir of the author’s mother (who had once been forced to attend one of the boarding schools and had remained traumatized ever since) and part investigative journalism into the history of the practice, Pemberer dug deep into researching and unearthing documents related to the schools. Some of them remained behind closed doors as the Catholic Church deemed the documents to be private while also disclaiming responsibility when it came to their roles in perpetuating the abuse of Native children put into their care.

While Canada has taken baby steps towards acknowledging their past by offering reparations (though at the time of the book’s publication, less than 10% of the promised amount have been disbursed to the Native communities), the US are more intent on keeping the dead buried and burying their heads in the sand along with their secrets. Native communities all over the world are still fighting for their rights and reparations, and it is hard not to see the past injustice echoed by current situations elsewhere (🇵🇸🇨🇩), as some colonial powers are still taking lessons from the US’s handbook.

This is a highly recommended read, in any case; no one is free until everyone is.

Generational trauma lingers in our DNA, family cycles, and more. We may unwittingly pass it along if we don't recognize and stop the cycle.

Generational and community trauma from government-sponsored genocide is even more insidious. It destroys connections--to oneself, others, traditions, and more. The U.S. government sponsored many genocidal campaigns against Indigenous nations from the start, and colonizers did before the U.S. became a country. One of the government-sponsored genocides was the boarding schools.

Boarding schools were designed to destroy people and cultures. Child abuse was built in to the foundation of the schools; it was a feature. They were designed to terrorize children and decimate nations. The extent of evil can be difficult to grasp.

The author brings it to life through showing the impact on her family and herself. She elegantly weaves in research showing the tapestry of genocide while illuminating her family's experience.

Anyone who has boarding school survivors in their family, community, city, state, or nation (aka everyone in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and more) needs to read this book and listen to the survivors in their midst. Bear witness and take steps to address the lasting impact of genocide.

This is the most powerful book I read in 2024, and I can't stop talking about it.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC.

Medicine River by Mary Annette Pember is a heartfelt and evocative novel that delves into the life of a Native American woman, exploring her struggles with identity, family, and healing. The story intricately weaves together themes of trauma, resilience, and cultural heritage, offering a poignant portrayal of contemporary Indigenous life. Pember's writing is rich and immersive, capturing the complexities of the character's experiences while highlighting the importance of community and connection to the land. It's a moving and thought-provoking work that provides valuable insights into the Indigenous experience in modern America.