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.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an eARC copy of Medicine River by Mary Annette Pember.

Medicine River is a poignant exploration of the painful legacy of Native American boarding schools, illuminating the profound impact these institutions have had on families and communities. Drawing from her own heritage as an Ojibwe journalist, Pember delves deep into her mother's experiences at a seminary in Wisconsin, weaving together personal narrative and historical context to craft a compelling account of resilience amid trauma.

Pember provides a stark portrayal of the boarding school system, which operated under the guise of assimilation and opportunity. The detailed accounts (which will break your heart) reveal the brutal realities faced by Native children - physical punishment for speaking their languages, forced labor, and emotional neglect. The violence of the institution disrupted individual lives and also sought to sever the ties that bind communities together.

The most important aspect of the novel is the intimate interviews and meticulous research which captures the echoes of these experiences across generations. Her mother's struggles resonate throughout the narrative, highlighting how the scars of the past have shaped both her life and the lives of subsequent generations. Her exploration of the relationship between herself and her mother is particularly moving, as it underscores the complex dynamics of love and loss within families affected by trauma. The importance is also Pember's unwavering commitment to authenticity. She doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths of history, but also illuminates the ways which Native cultures are reclaiming their narratives and traditions. Medicine River isn't just a book about suffering; it is also a testament to resilience, strength, and the ongoing fight for cultural survival.

Medicine River is an important read for anyone seeking to understand the enduring impact of colonial policies on Native American communities.

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC. I have been reading both fiction and non-fiction books involving the Native American boarding school experience. This book has a personal viewpoint, as the author's mother was sent away, and she shares how this impacted her mother and her, as well as other family members' stories. However, as the author is a journalist, she also shares a large amount of research on the boarding schools in Canada and the United States and their long term impact on generations of families. The author also delves into the role the Catholic Church played into this system, and discusses the moves toward reparation by Canada. I very much appreciated learning about the move for natural healing approaches being conducted in Alaska, recognizing that their own culture has tools for healing that can be more effective than those tools created by the same group that was responsible for the horrendous action originally.
Very well researched and written, and brings the issue to a personal level as well.