' INNOCENCE FOREVER STOLEN ' : BOOK REVIEW

'' Medicine River : A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools. By Mary Annette Pember.

'' Medicine River '' weaves together the history of the U.S. government's brutal crusades to exterminate, then assimilate, Native Americans, with her mother's experience at St. Mary's Catholic Indian Mission School, in Odannah Wis 

In 1892, Richard Henry Pratt,- the founder of one of the United States' first Native American boarding schools, told an audience.

'' A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,'' referring to George Armstrong Custer's bloody massacres. '' In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this : that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.''

Before establishing the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Pratt participated in the forced removal of tribes from the southern planes while a U.S., cavalry officer.

The school was another act of genocide : Upon entering, children/students were given English names, forced to convert to Christianity and punished for speaking in their native languages or observing tribal customs.

Pratt's institute became the model for more than 500 religious and federal boarding schools attended by hundreds or thousands of indigenous children between 1819 and 1970.

While some parents willingly sent their offspring, many more resisted and endured beatings, imprisonment and denial of their treaty-guaranteed food rations.

Through force or poverty-fueled necessity, so many Indian children were taken to boarding schools through the 1970s, '' writes Mary Annette Pember in her piercing new memoir, '' Medicine River,'' that virtually no Indian family remains untouched by the experience today.

Pember was perfectly positioned to write this book. She's an enrolled citizen of the  Red Cliff Bank of Wisconsin Ojibwe, a journalist who has reported on Native issues for more than two decades, and the granddaughter and daughter of boarding school survivors.

The World Students Society thanks Julia Scheeres.