Mary Annette Pember, citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe and a Cincinnati resident for more than 25 years, has been heading toward writing Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools her entire life. (The book is published on April 22 by Penguin Randon House.) Her mother, Bernice, was raised in a boarding school and would tell Pember stories as a child. “They were sort of presented to me in almost mythical form,” she says.
As Pember grew up and excelled in school, Bernice realized her daughter had a talent for writing and wanted her to use the gift. “She really imbued me with the notion that writing could have a redemptive quality and that it’s what I was supposed to do,” says Pember.
After Bernice and her siblings were abandoned by their mother, they had no broad support network to fall back on—years of federal and state government policies had stripped economic security and sovereignty away from the Ojibwe tribe. They lived at a boarding school run by Catholic nuns who were haughty, self-righteous, and cruel, a combination that left a horrible imprint on Bernice. Pember recalls her mother describing how she celebrated when one of the sisters fell down the stairs on Christmas, but knows she grew up to be a Catholic herself. “My mother became a Catholic church lady, but it always stuck in her craw,” says Pember. “You almost felt like she wanted to just spit it out.”
As the child of this hurting woman, Pember struggled with trauma through her mother’s bedtime confessionals and erratic behavior—holding her children close one moment and rejecting them the next.
Pember first told her mother’s stories as a student at the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in journalism. As part of a class project, she and her mother visited the site of Bernice’s boarding school, which became the basis for a class project called So Long, Tootsie Porkchop, a typeset, 12-copy edition of a book of photographs and prose. “She [Bernice] would tell me about her life at the Sister School where the Franciscan nuns in their boundless generosity lined up the Indian children like little cadets and beat them into the spirit of Christianity,” Pember wrote in the chapbook. “Thus her childhood inextricably wove itself into my own.”
Pember became a newspaper reporter, which brought her to Cincinnati in the 1980s to work for The Enquirer, and she then transitioned to writing about Native American issues as an independent journalist. She resettled in Cincinnati in 1998 and currently serves as a national correspondent for ICT News (formerly Indian Country Today). Many of her journalism pieces explore the history of boarding schools and other impacts of colonization on Native people, but she hasn’t written about her personal story until now.
“I think everybody has trauma in their lives, or many, many of us do,” says Pember. “And we must learn how to understand it and forge a way forward so that we’re not just forced to relive it.”
In Medicine River, Pember regards her own story as a kind of hinge to the larger sociohistorical context of assimilation policies in the U.S. The book is carefully constructed so that readers follow the story of Pember’s life, but it also opens windows into how she and her mother’s story demonstrates a much larger picture. The physical and cultural survival of Native people, says Pember, is a miraculous and remarkable story.
Pember says Medicine River fulfills an unspoken promise to her mother to expose religious hypocrisy. While the nuns felt they were doing God’s work, talking about how they “saved these children” and “fulfilled this need,” actually the Catholic church was “aligned from the very beginning with these explorers and Europeans who came to North American to exploit its resources.” While Bernice and her brother might not have had other options as children than to attend the boarding school, that reality existed only because of the U.S. government’s genocidal actions across multiple generations. The schools stripped children of their cultural heritage and familial relations, following an old colonial concept to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
Such hypocrisy continues today, Pember says, as churches—mainly evangelical ones now—venture into impoverished Native communities and offer idiosyncratic help that no one requested. She recalls an interaction with church-goers on a mission trip in Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who were building bunk beds using raw wood and used mattresses from a nearby college. Unfortunately, the wood turned out to be the perfect environment for bed bugs. When Pember asked the trip leaders why they were doing this work, she was told it was “something they could do.”
Pember shakes her head. “It’s kind of a cottage industry, I think, for some of these organizations to have a mission experience where they visit people who are unlike them and sufficiently othered, if you will,” she says. “The people are presented as exotic, and of course they’re poor. And one can feel good about having done something.”
For injustices to be addressed, Pember and others have called for the Catholic Church to release documentation offering a fuller scope of the boarding schools’ history, including enrollment data and names. Doing so may help families uncover the truth about children who left for boarding school and never returned; many were buried on boarding school land in graves that were often unmarked and unknown to the families.
Pember had an opportunity review the paperwork related to her mother’s experience. To her shock, she found a reference to the nun falling down the stairs, a story she heard often as a child and included in both So Long, Tootsie Porkchop and Medicine River. In finding the story, she had a small way of validating, though decades later, the secrets her mother shared with her—and she can look now on both her mother and herself with more compassion.
There is no way to go back to a world before the settlers arrived on Native land, and in any case Native culture has always been adapting to change. Instead of moving backwards, Pember says, it’s valuable to magnify and center the old cultural elements that remain.
One such element is a jingle dress, a garment made by Native women across many tribes to wear at powwows. The fabric is covered by hundreds of small bells that ring when they’re worn in dance or protest. Originally, the bells were made from the tops of consumer goods, like snuff can lids, and reshaped into cones by hand. You can buy the cones today, as Pember did when she made her own jingle dress that she’s worn at powwows in Wisconsin.
By remembering and reclaiming and by writing and magnifying, Pember enjoys participating in the ongoing work of cultural preservation and renewal. “Primarily this book is about fulfilling my promise to my mother,” she says, but writing about these topics was “irresistible.” “I have to do this. It’s just always in my head, always. I dream about it. My job is to elevate these things and put them before people. I always feel like I’m operating as part of something greater than myself.”
Mary Annette Pember appears at 7 p.m. April 22 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers to discuss “Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools.” She’ll be in conversation with Briana Mazzolini-Blanchard, executive director of Cincinnati’s Urban Native Collective.
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