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.
Sierra will talk about the history of American Indian boarding schools in Michigan, her family story, and read from her book, What the Ancestors Say: One Journalist’s Intimate Investigation into Indian Boarding Schools.
Books will be available for purchase.
Funding for this program provided by Michigan Humanities.
