Review: Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools , by Mary Annette Pember

Mary Annette Pember’s memoir is a timely contribution to both the field of Native American Studies and boarding school era histories of the United States. The book is a deeply personal account of Pember’s Ojibwe family history on the Bad River Reservation in northwestern Wisconsin. She recounts the violence of boarding schools, detention centers, surveillance, and enforcement. The book is difficult in its detailing of violence, often leaving the reader with a feeling of overwhelming grief. This, however, like other personal narratives from the boarding school era, helps to situate the intergenerational trauma of boarding schools and other federal Indian policies in Native American and Indigenous life. In addition to grief, the reader experiences moments of rage, humor, joy, and refusal—all aspects essential to understanding Indigenous response to settler colonial violence. This range of emotions is what makes Pember’s work most compelling. While not an academic book per se, Medicine River blends the personal and historical to effective if uneven results.The book is organized into an introduction followed by ten chapters. Each chapter details an aspect of Pember’s family history alongside a general history of federal Indian policy, reservation establishment, and boarding schools, and specifically describes how these histories intertwined on the Bad River Reservation. Importantly, Pember intersperses the histories with Ojibwe narratives in effective ways. As an example, in “The Sister School Comes to Odanah,” Pember notes that the French explorers who came to Odanah (or Bad River Reservation) named the river flowing through the region Riviere Mauvaise, or Bad River, because of their difficulty in navigating it (45). The author notes, however, that Ojibwes “have always called it Mashkiziibii, Medicine River; it’s said that everything needed for mino-bimadizwin, a good life—food, medicine, and spirit—is available in its coffee-colored waters and along its banks” (45). This refusal of settler reorientation of Ojibwe land, history, grief, rage, humor, and joy threaded throughout the work is an essential contribution to the book’s narrative structure.Several themes are brought forth in this memoir. One is feminist rage and anger. This was the most compelling part of the work, and I kept going back to this theme throughout. Pember reveals her family dynamic to readers in compelling and often brutal ways. The recounting of childhood memories from a point of rage and anger are important interventions of the text. Rather than narrate her childhood through “rosy” or “grief-filled” narratives, Pember compellingly situates humor, rage, and anger in the text. It was refreshing to read and feel the palpable anger throughout the book. The aptly titled chapter 4, “Rage for Survival,” starts with a reflection on joking and humor and moves into the fierceness of Ojibwe women. She narrates throughout the chapter women’s cunning and willingness to outsmart White people who sought to destroy the humanity of Indigenous people in boarding schools. In Dian Million’s “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” the author argues that felt experiences (i.e., grief, rage, anger, pain) of historical and contemporary traumas, such as the boarding school era, are an important Indigenous feminist method and are essential in speaking toward our own Indigenous histories, in our own words, and through our own felt experiences.1 Feminist rage is an important Indigenous felt methodology in considering the violence of settler society to Native American and Indigenous people today, and Pember uses this method to great effect in her work.Pember’s narration of the history of boarding school policy alongside her family’s specific history and trauma is both effective and slightly disjointed. The transitions between the history of federal Indian policy and her family story are never quite seamless. As a history, the book needs footnotes with primary source citations to support the historic timeline of federal Indian policy. Pember engages with secondary sources, but a review of notes reveals a lack of adequate engagement with primary sources. Furthermore, the author’s overreliance on web sources is problematic from a research method standpoint. With the large number of archival, primary, and secondary sources that exist on the boarding school program, there is no reason to over-cite web sources. While I can appreciate that this is a memoir blended with historical narratives, greater attention to primary source citation would make Pember’s history sections more compelling and would strengthen her overall argument. Archival engagement is necessary for a full understanding of Native perspectives on the legacy of Indian boarding schools, and its absence weakens Pember’s narration of Native American history.While reading the text I thought very intently about its intended audience. Though many of the book’s themes will be familiar to Native and Indigenous people affected by the intergenerational trauma of the boarding schools and federal policies of assimilation, dispossession, and violence, I am curious about how settler audiences will take this work. These are often considerations I make in my own research detailing difficult, violent, and personal histories of settler occupation, especially how settlers who absorb Indigenous trauma and pain will choose to show up for Indigenous people. In her compelling article “Refusal to Forgive: Indigenous Women’s Love and Rage,” Rachel Flowers asserts that it is the right of Indigenous women (and people, broadly) to refuse to forgive, to make comfortable settlers who are only interested in witnessing our pain, not our collective liberation. As she writes: “Many Indigenous peoples are not willing to forgive settler violence, so how can we trust and move forward in co-resistance without first being able to relinquish our resentment? This places the onus on Indigenous peoples to facilitate moving forward with settler society for a shared future of co-existence on our lands and in our lives”2 This quote stayed with me while reading Pember’s book and it felt relevant to much of how the author situated her own memoir. Rage, anger, and grief are palpable throughout the text, unapologetically. Pember very specifically names the settlers who were part of the violence against Ojibwe people at Bad River Reservation, noting in one chapter: “Unlike Indians, the nuns had forgotten about the nearly ninety years they spent on Bad River as a part of the assimilationist agenda to Christianize and civilize us” (205). She does not absolve settlers in her memoir, another important Indigenous feminist intervention.Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Board Schools is an essential memoir that bridges history and felt experiences in compelling and important ways. The book helps to situate the distressing history of the Indian boarding school era with the personal intergenerational experiences of the author. It is an important read in engaging with Indigenous feminist methodologies such as felt theory alongside understanding the deep, and continued, effects of settler occupation.