In Search of Accountability for Native Boarding Schools

With Mary Annette Pember

Today, my guest offers an account of Native boarding schools and justice long overdue.

In Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, Mary Annette Pember shares her mother’s experience at a Catholic boarding school in northern Wisconsin. The story offers a glimpse into what boarding schools were like and how their legacy continues to shape Native life today. As Mary told me, both the government and the Church “need to be called out” as the U.S. finally begins to reckon with this chapter of its history.

Mary is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of the Wisconsin Ojibwe and national correspondent for ICT News (formerly Indian Country Today). Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. She’s also a past president of the Native American Journalists’ Association.

A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:

The Church’s dog ate its homework

Ben: To begin, can you give us some background on Native boarding schools?

MAP: Sure. One of the most important things to remember about Indian Boarding Schools is that they were part of a larger federal agenda to separate Native people from their lands. Christian missionaries saw converting “the pagans,” educating us, and overriding our culture and languages as part of their duty.

In a 30-year period after the Civil War, it was kind of a triple whammy for Native people. There was removal: the government took people from their lands and placed them elsewhere. There was also allotment, which forced Native people into private land ownership and divorced people from communal ownership.

And then there were boarding schools. We see their proliferation after the Civil War, when there was a much more aggressive push west. People wanted that land, but there was less of a taste among the American public for outright annihilation. Hence, enthusiasm for boarding schools.

Ben: There are so many whammies here, so many compounding effects. Just to touch on how widespread boarding schools were, by the 1920s, about 76% of Indian children, some as young as four years old, attended them.

MAP: Correct. It's still really difficult to find a Native family whose lives have not been touched by the boarding school experience.

Ben: You also talk about how a large portion of the cost for boarding schools came from Indian trust and treaty funds rather than federal appropriations. In your words, “We were forced into schools and, adding to that injury, forced to pay for them.”

MAP: And in the case of attending, for instance, Catholic Indian Boarding Schools, we paid twice. Because then we also had to pay for the ‘privilege’ to educate our children at these Catholic boarding schools, which were often located either on the reservation or closer.

Ben: How did your mom end up in one of the Catholic boarding schools?

MAP: Well, my grandparents’ marriage dissolved in ways that I get into in the book. Prior to European contact, in Ojibwe culture, in that situation and if parents were indisposed in some way, the extended family would care for your children—your brothers or sisters, aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

But in the 1930s, with the onset of the Great Depression and because of previous government policies, our family simply didn't have enough money. So there was really no choice but to send my mom and her siblings to St. Mary's Indian Industrial Boarding School, which they called the Sister School.

The school was probably about five miles away, but it might as well have been 3,000 miles away. When you boarded there, you pretty much had to stay there. I’ve often thought about how painful that must’ve been for my mother and her siblings. Family traditions that would have historically been applicable were denied to them.

Ben: You write that she stood “at a powerful historical nexus of Indigenous impoverishment.” That position seems like a hard thing for an adult to understand, let alone a kid.

Can you give us a sense of the day-to-day life at the Sister School?

MAP: Native children worked a lot.

Very early on, white settlers and missionaries were outraged that Native people didn’t work all the time. Instead, they binge worked when they were harvesting or hunting, and so on. In between, they would spend a lot of time talking and visiting (as we commonly call it), establishing consensus and building community. But to the Europeans, we weren’t accomplishing anything.

That perception led to the guiding principles of boarding schools: to teach Native children how to work. There were some classes in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, but children mainly did a lot of hard manual labor. They were trained to be maybe servants or farmhands, the only kinds of positions they felt that we were qualified for.

Obviously, not everybody was uniformly horrible to the children. My mother spoke occasionally of people who encouraged her, and she really clung to that. But when you’re taking kids away from what’s familiar—their food, their families—and you’re thrusting them into these unfamiliar environments that were really unhealthy, not surprisingly, children suffered and frequently became ill.

Ben: And then officials at these schools would send sick kids home.

MAP: Yes. Most of the illness was related to tuberculosis. When they saw children were getting sick and dying, they didn’t want that news to get out. So they began sending children home when it became clear they probably wouldn’t make it.

One scholar I spoke to estimates that as many as forty thousand Native children died while attending boarding school, and thousands of others died after going home sick.

Ben: Astonishing. If kids were dying at that rate today, we’d think there’s something very wrong going on here, and yet federally funded boarding schools existed for basically a century, into the 1970s.

MAP: Yes. Throughout that time, and beyond, I think the message that a lot of Indian kids got—that you are fundamentally wrong—stuck with them.

It certainly did for my mom. She was so filled with shame. The message from nuns that she was “a dirty Indian”—my mom remembered that all the time. She railed against it, but in many ways felt she could never escape it, no matter how hard she worked.

And yet, she had this fierce sense of survival that kept her going. In some ways, she was actually quite proud of being an Ojibwe woman, even if that image was also tainted for her.

Ben: You write, “Even though my mother was raised in a sister school where Ojibwe language and practice of culture were forbidden, she absorbed the power of our ways and passed them on to me. She did so through the inventive, unheralded ways our people resisted.”

MAP: The relationship between Ojibwe women is very strong, particularly between mother and daughter. She told me the Sister School stories every night—they were my bedtime stories. Of course, she removed a lot of the ugly parts. The older I got and the more chaotic I saw my family being, the more I wanted to know more about what had happened.

Ben: There’s a related history of Canadian boarding schools. How has Canada reckoned with some of this history in ways that the U.S. hasn’t?

MAP: When it comes to Native boarding schools, the U.S. was very much the template for Canada. It'd be nice if Canada could now be a template for us. They began taking a hard look at their history back in 2007. They’ve done things like collect and publish people’s stories, support mental health actions, and provide financial reparations.

I don't really see the United States doing financial reparations. Unlike Canada, we have a history of enslaving people. If we start making reparations to Native people, I think people worry about what would necessarily come next.

Former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is a citizen of one of the Pueblo tribes, introduced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. It seeks to gather and publish stories and also offer some mental health support for Native people. For the U.S., even just admitting that boarding schools happened and beginning to document the numbers is a lot of headway.

Ben: I note the caveat: for the U.S.

Then there’s the Church. You note that in 2022, Pope Francis traveled to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church's role in the country’s boarding school system. He asked for forgiveness, while adding that Catholic missionaries were merely adhering to “the colonizing mentality of the powers.”

The add-on there sounds like the institutional version of “my dog ate my homework.”

MAP: Yes: We were just following orders. Well, you folks helped create the orders—

Ben: —and often wrote the orders.

MAP: Right. And in the U.S., they got to reap the benefits of having “helped the poor Indians.” I think in many ways the Catholic Church's success in the States was built upon its work with Native people. As has been said before, by the 1930s and '40s, one could scarcely think of Indian Country without thinking of the Catholics. They got a lot of mileage out of that. Even today, we still have the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions.

Meanwhile, Native people are in many ways still just asking for the government to honor the promises it once made to us. When people are treated very poorly for generations, guess what? They don’t do so well. I think both the government and the Church need to be called out on this history before any sort of meaningful work toward justice begins.