What the Ancestors Say

Name: What the Ancestors Say
ISBN: 9798889831815

by Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau

Publisher

Broadleaf Books

Publication

Sep 29, 2026

Format

Hardback

Illustrated

Price

25.99

Dimensions

5.75 x 8.75 in

ISBN

9798889831815

Pages

213

Age

Adult 18+

Rights Sold

LanguageEnglish AudioCountryWorldwideAgent-BuyerBlack Rose Writing

Description

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..

Awards & Endorsements

Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin and Bad Indians Book Club

"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."

Author(s)

Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau

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.