The Metro: The government tried to erase her family. She found their names

For more than a century, the U.S. government took Native children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools. Students were forced to cut their hair, forbidden from speaking their languages, and abused in an effort to erase their identity. Richard Henry Pratt, the Army officer who founded the first of the so-called schools, said the point was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”

There were hundreds of these schools and Michigan had several. The federal government’s own investigation has documented hundreds of children who died at them, and found the real number is almost certainly far higher, because the records are incomplete or gone.

In 2021, Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau became the Traverse City Record-Eagle’s first full-time Native American reporter. When she started looking into the state’s boarding schools, she found 10 of her own relatives in the enrollment records, including her great-grandfather and his siblings.

“What the Ancestors Say“, out Sept. 29, is what came of the next two years — archives, survivor accounts, and the drive across Michigan to sit with elders who wanted to tell her what happened.

Nadeau, an Odawa Anishinaabe journalist, joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about what she found, how it changed her, and what a state does with a history it has yet to fully acknowledge.

This story originally aired on Sept. 9, 2026

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

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