Review: Medicine River by Mary Annette Pemberton (LA Times)

French settlers called it Bad River; to the Native Americans who lived there first, it was always Mashkiiziibii: Medicine River. According to Mary Annette Pember in her powerful new book of that name, the Ojibwe (sometimes Anglicized as Chippewa) believed that everything needed for a good life could be found “in its coffee-colored waters and along its banks.”

It was there, in an Ojibwe community in northern Wisconsin, that Pember’s mother, Bernice Rabideaux, was born a century ago. The prosperous timber industry, having stripped the region of its eastern white pine, was in retreat, leaving poverty in its wake. In 1930, as the Depression raged, Bernice and her siblings were sent to St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School in Odanah. She was 5.

“Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools” is an important work in the growing literature about the trauma those boarding schools inflicted on generations of Native peoples. Unlike other notable entries, including David Wallace Adams’ “Education for Extinction” and Bill Vaughn’s “The Plot Against Native America,” Pember’s book blends her research and reportage with memoir. It is, “above all, a quest. To understand myself, our family’s collective disease, Indian people’s unparalleled ability to survive, and the history of Indian boarding schools.”

For the review in full, visit The Los Angeles Times.