MEDICINE RIVER A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

Tlingit narrator Erin Tripp brings an authentic voice to Mary Annette Pember's investigation of the legacy of Indian boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada. Pember's mother, Bernice, attended a government-run and Catholic-operated school in Wisconsin in the 1930s, where she was starved, abused, and worked to the bone while being unable to practice her Ojibwe customs or speak her native language. Tripp does her best to keep the energy flowing when the text goes deep into the history of Spanish enslavement of Indigenous populations centuries ago, but she really shines in her delivery of the memoir elements of mother and daughter trauma and their efforts to find peace. Recent discoveries of the graves of thousands of Native children have brought more public attention to the shameful government policy--although responses in the U.S. and Canada have differed. A.B. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2025]