Festival Feature: Pember – ‘Bedtime Stories’ and the Boarding School Legacy
August 30, 2025
NOTE: A version of this story appears in our 2025 South Dakota Festival of Books guide, produced by South Dakota Magazine. Mary Annette Pember, a national correspondent for ICT News (formerly Indian Country Today) and an independent journalist focusing on Native American issues since 2000, will discuss her new book, Medicine River, at the Festival of Books, Sept. 26-28 in Spearfish.
Mary Annette Pember was alone inside a study room in the archives at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when suddenly she shot straight up out of her chair. Pember was sifting through hundreds of historical documents within the vast collection of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Her mother, Bernice Rabideaux, had attended St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Mission School near Odanah, Wisconsin, and a story from her time there had always stuck in Pember’s mind.
One year around Christmas, her mother told her, the principal of the school, Sister Mary Catherine, slipped on the cellar steps, hit her head and died. “What a cheer us kids did,” Bernice said. “It was the best Christmas gift we ever got.”
“It was just one of the stories that I grew up hearing, and I always assumed it was not necessarily entirely true,” Pember says. “My mother often talked about how harsh she [Sister Mary Catherine] was, and how she beat her for stealing an apple from the cellar. It was a very unforgiving environment framed by very hard manual labor and not a lot of education.”
But in the archives was a letter from December 1935 that described the sister’s fall, subsequent coma and seemingly imminent death. Pember instantly knew that her mother’s stories were real. “This was the smoking gun for my mother’s life.”
Those family stories provide personal perspective to the sad history that Pember uncovers in her new book Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools. For 150 years, tens of thousands of Native children were forced or coerced to attend a vast network of nearly 500 boarding schools in the United States. As many as 40,000 children died at those schools; thousands of others perished when children were sent home with fatal illnesses that spread among their tribe.
Renewed interest in the boarding school era was sparked in 2021 when more than 700 unmarked graves were discovered at a former residential school site in Saskatchewan. That development was a catalyst in the publication of Pember’s book, though it is history that has forever surrounded her. “They were my bedtime stories,” Pember says. “My mother always talked about her childhood at the Sister School. The implication was always that I would write her story and gain some sort of redemption and understanding for her and for Native people.”
With decades of experience as a journalist covering Native issues as well as a personal connection, Pember emerged with a unique account that she calls, “part journalist research, part spiritual pilgrimage.” Her research and reporting leads into an examination of the historical and multigenerational trauma that exists in Indigenous culture as a result of the boarding school experience.
Pember acknowledges that her book is built on the work of others, and she hopes future writers will use Medicine River in the same way. “I want to help nudge forward the scholarship around this issue,” she says. “Maybe my sharing of all this terrible stuff that happened might offer people some support and guidance as they do their own personal work.”
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