What the Ancestors Say

An Indigenous journalist's reporting on her state's Indian boarding schools becomes a sweeping journey through her family's history, the memories of survivors, and Native strategies of survival and resilience.

Reporting for her local newspaper, Odawa Anishinaabe journalist Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau stumbles onto a family's--and a nation's--buried stories. In enrollment records of Michigan boarding schools, she finds the names of ten of her ancestors thrown into the maw of American settler colonialism: Her great-grandfather and his siblings, along with generations before them, were forced to attend Indian boarding schools.

More than five hundred Indian residential schools operated in the US and at times enrolled more than 80 percent of Native children. The facilities, often run by churches, aimed to erase Indigenous life, one child at a time. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant. Young children were stripped of their homes, cultures, languages, hair, and dress.

Sifting through archives and the records of five Michigan schools whose names belie what happened there--Mt. Pleasant, Holy Childhood--Nadeau begins publishing articles. And the flood of emails and phone calls from Anishinaabek begins. Elders want to tell her their stories, so she drives around the state--to school gymnasiums and community centers and homes--and listens. Her uncle Tom, son of a survivor, becomes a gentle guide into the past they are discovering together. Nadeau writes it all down, not to collect traumas but to uncover deeper seams of resistance.

In this personal and communal odyssey through ancestral legacies, intergenerational trauma, and Native resistance and resilience, she calls us to attend to the truths of the past. "I am the sentence my ancestors whispered through wind, through prayers, through dreams," Nadeau writes. Now, in a powerful act of reclamation, she brings forward stories of people the government tried--and failed--to break.