Hidden mostly from non-Native people until recently, the history of Indian boarding schools emerged into mainstream awareness in large part because of a gruesome discovery: in 2021, the remains of 215 children were found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The discovery prompted questioning and investigation in both the United States and Canada, and eventually, an apology from Pope Francis about the Catholic Church’s role in running the Canadian schools.
But Native people in the United States and Canada didn’t need a reminder. The schools are part of living memory, and the generational trauma that they have caused still reverberates. In the United States, over the course of 150 years, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were subject to a program of forced assimilation at these schools, which numbered five hundred and were run by either the federal government or a religious denomination. Their purpose was described bluntly by Brigadier-General Richard Henry Pratt, founder of one of the largest: “To kill the Indian…to save the man.” One hundred of these schools were operated by the Catholic Church, more than any other denomination. Children were forbidden from speaking their Native languages and required to change their names. Their long hair was cut. They were forced into manual labor—housekeeping, farming, construction, blacksmithing—as part of their “education.” Food was inadequate and overcrowding caused disease to spread. Children were often physically punished, and clerical sexual abuse loomed over their lives. By the 1920s, 76 percent of Indigenous children were attending boarding schools, and one thousand of them had died. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, some students never returned home, and families have never been told what happened to them—if they ran away, or died from disease, abuse, a work accident, or suicide.
In Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, Pember plumbs her family history to illustrate the effect that the schools had on Indigenous people. One religious sister her mother encountered had a particularly harmful impact:
It was Sister Catherine’s shaming words…that seem to have cut deeper than any strap. According to Sister Catherine’s God, Indians were dirty, lazy, barely human creatures unfit to raise their own children. She believed God had sent her to save those children—soul by soul, brick by civilized brick—and make them into his servants, whether they liked it or not. Sister Catherine’s belittling phrase “dirty Indian” lingered in my mother’s ears, which she eventually poured into mine.