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.
Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau is an award-winning Odawa Anishinaabe storyteller from Traverse City, Michigan. In 2020, she started a fellowship with the Mishigamiing Journalism Project, a partnership between the Traverse City Record-Eagle and Indigenizing the News. In 2021, she received a fellowship with Report for America and became the Record-Eagle's first full-time Native American reporter and the state's only full-time Indigenous affairs reporter. She currently works as the reporting specialist for Miigwech, Inc., and also works as a freelance writer and keynote speaker.
Acknowledgments Chapter 1 A New Path Chapter 2 Ten Names Chapter 3 Uncle Tom Chapter 4 Michigan Treaties Chapter 5 Indoctrination, Ownership, and Relationship Chapter 6 Getting Rid of the "Indian Problem" Chapter 7 We Were Just Children Chapter 8 Mount Pleasant Chapter 9 Holy Childhood of Jesus Chapter 10 Harvest Author's Note Glossary Notes Sources
"There is a kind of collective amnesia, a forgetting and covering up of the history that brought us to this current moment. These stories of Indian boarding schools and their afterlife, woven with Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau's own family and community history, are a critical read." --PATTY KRAWEC, author of Becoming Kin and Bad Indians Book Club "If you want to understand how Indian boarding schools continue to shape Native families and communities, this book is essential. Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau weaves family history and community memory with care, honoring survivors while illuminating the lasting impacts of colonization. This is a powerful work of truth-telling and resilience, an essential read for those committed to truth, remembrance, justice, and repair." --MEREDITH MIGIZI, founder and executive director, Miigwech, Inc. "Through the fierce, yet elegant, writings of Sierra Nadeau, readers are centered into the epigenetic response reality of the Indian boarding school era. The intersectionality of dedicated journalism and raw DNA reactions offers insight into the complexities of the sacredness these truths hold. This book helps those who are seeking the tribal historical perspectives needed to begin or deepen responsible advocacy within the justice and healing efforts of the Indian boarding school legacy." --LEORA TADGERSON, director of Reparations and Justice, Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan "For the very first time, someone listened to my story and felt compelled to include it in theirs. Years of understanding, but a flood of tears arrived when I finished. Both of my personal issues were approached with caution but truth-telling. Miigwech for your tenacious behavior. You followed and answered a big enough portion that people who read this will look for more of the same. I applaud Sierra and appreciate her heart! --MELISSA MOSES, elder of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians "In this astonishing book, Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau weaves many voices into a narrative masterpiece. 'I am the word my ancestors were forced to swallow,' she writes. These pages are haunted: by generations that were silenced, by broken treaties, and by Nadeau's own lived experience of intergenerational trauma. What makes this work so powerful is that it is so relatable, so personal, not just to the author but to all of its readers as well." --JOSHUA VEITH, educator, ally, and author of the Sudden Quiet trilogy "The stories in What the Ancestors Say must be told so that we can all heal together. My mom was a boarding school survivor. The stories she told me about her experience were like a horror show. I, too, had my own horror stories, which were side effects of the boarding school system. Growing up on the reservation was awesome, but the school experience was terrible. Government teachers would be contracted in from other parts of the country. We would be hit by these government workers, and our parents couldn't do anything because they feared the government would take their kids away. This book contains so many stories that need to be told. Thanks to Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau for writing this amazing book, which will help so many people to begin their healing journey." --DOUG GOOD FEATHER, author of Think Indigenous and executive director of the Lakota Way Healing Center
