Angry women populate Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, a deeply reported and engrossing memoir detailing an American atrocity about which most Americans know very little. It’s driven by author Mary Annette Pember’s lifelong quest to understand why her mother was so difficult.
At every turn, Pember uncovers surprises, secrets, and sometimes startling details about Bernice Rabideaux, an Ojibwe Indian who grew up on the Bad River Reservation in Northern Wisconsin. Later, as a mother, Rabideaux would tell her young daughter endless stories about her awful years as a residential student at what was known locally as the Sister School. Decades later, when Pember came across a document in the archives at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she had to catch her breath: There was Sister Catherine, and a photo, too. At last, an image of the so-despised villain in her mother’s many accounts.
Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
By Mary Annette Pember
Pantheon, 304 pages
Publication date: April 22, 2025
Another nemesis was Cele Moore, Rabideaux’s mother. Though Pember never met her grandmother, she had heard tales of a loud, often vulgar woman who also baked excellent pies. Pember expresses a hint of pride upon later discovering, while combing through Congressional records, that Moore was politically active. She had chaired the first ever Indian-organized chapter of the League of Women Voters and advocated for federal legislation that in 1934 reversed Indian assimilationist policies of the previous century.
At that point, Moore had already left her troubled and sometimes violent marriage to Rabideaux’s father, an action that would doom most of her children to the St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Mission School on the Bad River Reservation, or Sister School, beginning in 1930. Given the options of physical survival or motherhood, Pember says, Moore abandoned the latter and chose the former. Over Rabideaux and her siblings’ eight or so years at the school, their mother visited once.
Pieces of the puzzle were emerging. Ojibwe women are “known for their fierceness,” Pember writes in a chapter addressing the role of defiance in a traumatized childhood. “Rage will, it seems, keep you alive.”
A 2022 report by the U.S. Department of the Interior highlights the violence endured in these schools by children between 1819 and 1969. That solitary confinement, starvation, beatings, and other forms of oppression that occurred across more than 400 boarding schools in the United States is old news for most Indigenous people. Medicine River tells a broader audience how the U.S. government, often with a complicit Catholic Church, sought to destroy Indian culture, tradition, and identity in order to steal their land and their dignity. The schools purported to civilize Indian children through education but in effect committed them to lifetimes of shame and struggle, saddled by the stain of being a dirty Indian. It also demonstrates how that legacy continues in future generations.
A longtime journalist who has been covering boarding schools and related issues for decades as a correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today, Pember brings to light important groundwork laid by others. Preston McBride’s 2020 doctoral dissertation, for example, shows how schools were able to weaponize tuberculosis, finding it a “cheap solution” to the Indian problem, as Pember told an audience recently at a Wisconsin Book Festival event in Madison. Rather than treat the infectious disease, the schools would send the kids back home, where their contagion could spread to families and friends. Pember also interviews members of a group she describes as “homegrown historians,” mostly women, who have patiently and methodically collected evidence over the years that supports the larger story of the cultural eradication of Indigenous people. These researchers, she writes, have “known that the day of reckoning would eventually arrive, and when it did, they’d be ready to help guide the way.”
Pember traces a key moment in that reckoning to May 2021, when the discovery of more than 200 unmarked graves of Indian students at a residential school in Canada made headlines around the world. (Canadian authorities have now detected more than 2,000 children’s graves at residential schools). A month later, then U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland ordered a similar investigation in the United States. In 2024, then President Joe Biden issued a historic apology. But Pember’s reporting rejects any notion that the United States and the Catholic Church have owned up to or attempted to atone for their injustices, still so deeply ingrained.
Medicine River adds to recent and growing literature highlighting the relatively recent history of oppression of marginalized groups. These include the 2019 novel The Nickel Boys (and the film that came out in 2024), an account of the now-closed reform school in Florida where former students, many of them African American boys, say they were beaten or sexually abused, and 2021’s Small Things Like These (also made into a film in 2024), which explores the exploitation and suffering faced by unwed pregnant girls and women who were forced into unpaid labor and worse in an institution run by Catholic nuns in Ireland.
Pember’s unique contribution is her personal account. She recalls her own rebellious youth: running away from home at age thirteen, selling LSD and hashish in California, and engraving the word “squaw” into her forearm during a stint in a Milwaukee detention center using needles, thread, and broken disposable pens. It was, she says, an attempt “to make that derogatory term so often used against me my own.”
Many of her memories are told via her child’s eye growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, a five-or-so-hour drive south of the Bad River Reservation, where her mother settled and married her father, a white man. For whatever reason, Rabideaux had selected Pember, her only daughter, as the primary repository of her painful memories, often shared at bedtime. From under her family’s kitchen table or wedged into a corner, Pember also eavesdropped on adult conversations, accumulating sometimes inexplicable details that might only make sense decades later.
Later, with the support of a loving marriage and Alcoholics Anonymous, Pember pulled herself out of her downward trajectory. One day, she says, she realized that she was “no longer angry” with her mother. By the end of her book, Pember has covered the amateurish “squaw” inscription with a tattoo that pays tribute to a piece of her mother’s beadwork, whose strength and intricate design Pember said she admires. Rabideaux suffered a stroke in 2010, and died in 2011 at age eighty-six in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Pember and her family now live.
Later, in response to a “vague directive from the universe,” Pember sewed herself a jingle dress made with snuff can lids with the faith that its purpose would be revealed. It was; she wore it in memory of her mother while dancing during a healing ceremony in Bad River.
For some reason, Pember only vaguely clarifies her book’s title. Bad River was named by the French (Rivière Mauvaise), who found the waterway a challenge to navigate, and she sticks with that name throughout the book. She does note, however, that Ojibwe people have always called it Mashkiiziibii, or Medicine River, and its coffee-colored waters and the land around it are said to hold everything needed for a good life: food, medicines, and spirit. It is, she writes later, “a place that feeds Ojibwe body and spirit.”