What the Ancestors Say

Local journalist shares her investigation into Indian boarding schools in new book

There’s an Anishinaabe belief that the mind, body, and spirit are all interconnected. As such, hurting one inevitably damages the other two. But when you heal one, you also heal the others.

It’s exactly this concept that’s at the core of award-winning Anishinaabe storyteller Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau’s debut book, What the Ancestors Say: One Journalist’s Intimate Investigation into Indian Boarding Schools, which will publish on Sept. 29, with a pre-launch party at The Folded Leaf in Traverse City on Sept. 26.

“I want to bring attention to Michigan’s history of Indian boarding schools to uplift the voices of the generations that attended them,” Nadeau says. “The better educated we are, the better able we are to move forward.”

A Western Michigan University graduate, Nadeau’s educational background is actually in freshwater science and sustainability, a field which, she says, didn’t take her long to discover wasn’t the right fit. When she was approached by a journalist acquaintance about giving writing a try, though, she was wary.

“At first I told her no, that I didn’t trust journalists,” Nadeau says. “But she told me there was a program at the Record-Eagle [in Traverse City] about bringing indigenous voices into media by indigenous people. I thought, maybe I need to do this.”

That program was the Mishigamiing Journalism Project, which the paper launched in 2020 in partnership with Indigenizing the News. Through it, Nadeau wrote for six months, before receiving a Report for America fellowship and subsequently breaking ground as The Record-Eagle’s first Native American journalist, as well as the pen behind Michigan’s first indigenous news beat.

Since then, her work has appeared in various media throughout the state. She’s also a freelance writer, a keynote speaker, and as of 2021, a reporting specialist for Anishinaabe-led nonprofit, Miigwech, Inc.

Picking Up the Story

It was during her time with the Record-Eagle, however, that Nadeau first uncovered her family’s connection to Michigan’s Indian boarding schools.

It all goes back to May 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that a radar sweep had discovered evidence of a shocking 215 unmarked graves at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the United States is estimated to have established more than 500 Indian boarding schools under the guise of providing federal resources, like education and housing, for Indigenous communities, while also equipping entrants with the skills to participate in an increasingly European (read: white) society.

The reality, however, couldn’t have been further from the truth.

During these institutions’ more than 150-year legacy in the U.S., survivors’ stories tell us that their walls hid countless atrocities, including corporal punishment, deplorable living conditions, cultural isolation, and even sexual abuse that indigenous children were made to endure for decades.

Per Nadeau, these facilities also functioned as pointed tools of colonialism, stripping indigenous students of their native cultures in the name of assimilation. Though several functioned throughout the state from the early 19th to late 20th centuries (with the last of Michigan’s programs closing as recently as 1983), Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School in Mount Pleasant and The Holy Childhood School of Jesus in Harbor Springs were two of the state’s most notorious.

When the buzz surrounding Kamloops died down shortly after the headlines passed, though, Nadeau wasn’t finished talking about it.

“Being in the field and also being an indigenous woman, I was tired of seeing our tragedies make front line newspapers, and then [nothing else],” she says.

Deepening the Narrative

So, she took it upon herself to keep the topic alive in her storytelling, both to increase public awareness as well as foster engagement from non-indigenous communities.

It was in the midst of this journey that Nadeau stumbled upon 10 of her relatives, including her great-grandfather Cletus, on a roster of Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School’s former students. The discovery was jarring.

Though Nadeau knew she was Native American, she grew up with a relative cultural disconnect. “I just didn’t understand what it was to be Anishinaabe,” she says. The process of reconnecting with that indigeneity didn’t fully take hold until early adulthood, when the death of her great-grandmother Helena first urged her to reclaim and preserve her family’s traditions.

The boarding school roster sparked a fresh wave of unanswered questions: Why hadn’t her family mentioned that they’d also been victims of Indian boarding schools? How had they kept it hidden for so long, and what did their history actually look like?

Healing from these questions and acknowledging that some of them might never be answered is at the crux of the journey Nadeau documents in her debut book, What the Ancestors Say.

“I wanted to bring attention to [that] history, especially as it pertains to Michigan, to better educate the greater community and uplift [survivors’] voices,” she adds.

Sharing the Truth

The book follows Nadeau’s investigation of Indian boarding schools from the Record-Eagle’s newsroom, to the late nights parsing painful history, to the countless pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising Anishinaabe peoples and the generations of cultural resilience and practices that nevertheless survived.

Structured as an even split between detailed history and firsthand narration, the book chronicles the abiding social, civil, and religious ideologies that led to the rise (and subsequent raze) of the Indian boarding school system in Michigan—among them, Christianity, the dehumanization of native populations, and a series of federal treaties designed to strip them of their ancestral lands. It also introduces readers to the communities that are still affected by the aftermath.

Nadeau is also quick to point out that systemic tools of colonialism, like the policies that laid the foundation for Indian boarding schools, affect everybody.

“When people think about Indian boarding schools, they’re often looking at just one concept,” she says. “But, it’s actually part of a larger system that also affects non-indigenous people, especially when we look at issues like Line 5 and data centers. These are all tools of colonialism, and everybody suffers from them.”

As Nadeau highlights in the book, one surefire way to resist the effects of that system is by keeping community.

“That [collective] aspect is deeply rooted in Anishinaabe beliefs,” she says. “I would not have been able to write or research this book without my community—not just from the love and support I’ve received, but also because my community made me.”

Similarly, the currents of resistance that carried Anishinaabe culture, often quietly, across miles and centuries are also the product of standing together. From a modern lens, Nadeau notes, this could look like something as simple as a child performing a dance at a powwow or learning traditional harvest methods, to the larger-scale work of restoring Manoomin (aka wild rice), fighting for indigenous land and water rights, and preserving the Anishinaabemowin language.

Moving forward from the stain of Indian boarding schools, then, must also be a community effort. “I think that our resistance is who we are as Anishinaabe people,” she adds.

Joining the Resistance

Though this doesn’t mean that non-indigenous communities are exempt from supporting that resistance, Nadeau is also careful to make the distinction between amplifying Native American voices and speaking for them.

“As an ally, I think it’s more about handing us the microphone rather than speaking into [it],” she explains.

This is where the importance of continued education comes in, she adds, whether that looks like supporting local libraries, delving further into state history—“there’s a lot of dense [information] in the book, but that’s really just skimming the top of it,” Nadeau says—or staying abreast of current events, like the revised Michigan senate bill 962 (introduced in 2022), which would include the history of Indian boarding schools as part of statewide curricula.

Other ways to get involved include amplifying the voices of indigenous activists and storytellers and contributing to related nonprofits.

“My intent for the book was for [audiences] to crave more,” Nadeau adds. “I want readers to feel connections with different emotions, whether that’s anger or empathy or finding joy in community. I want them to find that connection and then I want them to decide what their second step is.”

About the Event

Join Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau at The Folded Leaf in Traverse City for a pre-release launch party and presentation of What the Ancestors Say on Friday, Sept. 26 from 6-7:30pm. There’s also a community celebration of the book hosted by Miigwech, Inc., featuring music, food, and book giveaways, in the works for the first week of October—stay tuned! Find The Folded Leaf at 414 E. Eighth Street in Traverse City. thefoldedlfeafnomi.com

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