Brittany Penner is an author, practicing family physician and a lecturer with the University of Manitoba Max Rady College of Medicine, and has been a keynote speaker at the University of Manitoba.
Her new books is Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home.
At Oprah Daily Penner shared "her essential reading list for Native American Heritage Month, including three seminal memoirs, a YA murder mystery, and a picture book packed with wisdom." One title on the list:
Medicine River, by Mary Annette PemberRead about another entry on the list.
While the national conversation about the legacy of residential schools—which forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families and culture for generations—has been ongoing in Canada for many years, it is only just beginningin the United States, where President Biden issued a formal apology in 2024.
Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember explores America’s reluctance to reckon with its history of violence against Indigenous people, as she details the effects on her childhood and family after her mother was forced to attend one of these schools. Through both historical and personal accounts, Pember highlights the intergenerational trauma that continues to weave itself through communities still processing the impact of these schools and the legacy of government-sponsored cultural genocide. The timing of this book is all the more powerful as certain leaders wish to, again, erase parts of our collective history. In combining her family history with the wider history of these schools, Pember forces us to confront an age-old question that has only grown more timely in this political moment: How might we know where we wish to go when we do not first reckon with the past?
--Marshal Zeringue
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