“I knew I was going to write from my earliest memory,” says Mary Annette Pember.
While Pember has more than fulfilled the dream that started calling to her in childhood — becoming a journalist who has written for Indian Country Today, ReWire News, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Yes! Magazine, the Progressive and other publications — her initial forays into reporting were more humble.
As a child, Pember would sit underneath the kitchen table in her family’s Janesville, Wisconsin, home, clutching a black crayon. She used her own symbols and language to record, on the table’s underside, what was going on around her, until her older brothers taught her how to write names and words.
Childhood was rough for Pember, a member of the Red Cliff Tribe of Wisconsin Ojibwe, and school wasn’t welcoming. “I would walk out, go to the library down the street and just read,” she recalls. “I made my own way, I really did.”
While Pember dropped out of school after eighth grade, she never lost her love of words, the rhythm of language or the power of storytelling. After a supportive experience at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater at Rock County, where she developed a passion for photography, Pember made her way to UW-Madison. There, professors like Betsy Draine of the English department, Gerda Lerner, who taught women’s history, and Ada Deer, who taught in the School of Social Work and American Indian Studies Program, left a profound impression.
“I was on the edge of my seat,” she says. “I thought, here are people who get me, who speak my language. I was so hungry and they gave me food.”
Pember eventually chose journalism as her major, and an advisor helped her land a yearlong internship with a now-folded newspaper chain. Her journalism led her on to become the first Native woman staff photographer at the Green Bay Press Gazette, the Arizona Republic, the Oregonian and the Lexington Herald Leader.
Home, for the past 20 years, has been Cincinnati, Ohio, the hometown of her husband, John Metz, who earned a master’s degree and PhD from the UW-Madison geography department. During this time, Pember has moved into the role of independent journalist, writing about Native American issues for a variety of both mainstream and Native publications.
“At this time in life, I do what I want to do,” she says of choosing assignments. “If I get pissed off about something, I’m halfway there.”
Pember, a past president of the Native American Journalists’ Association, or NAJA, has covered the high rates of sexual assault among Native women, the impact of historical trauma on Native communities, federal policy issues and cultural topics. She’s reported on the high rates of substance abuse and suicide among LGBTQ youth in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and written op-eds on events like National Native American Heritage Month.
At times, she’s made her work personal. She chronicled the experience of taking her 12-year-old son to Standing Rock to interview people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, and earlier this year, for the Atlantic, she wrote about the trauma her mother and other Native children endured when they were forced into boarding schools, a topic she continues to investigate.
Pember’s work has garnered a wide range of awards, including UW-Madison’s Ralph Nafziger Alumni Achievement Award in 1992, multiple National Association of News Photographers contests, the NAJA’s Photographer of the Year and Best Feature Writing award. Her series on sex trafficking of Native women earned NAJA’s First Place Beat Reporting award, and her work on missing and murdered Indigenous women won a Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications.
Currently, Pember is pursuing storytelling projects through two prestigious fellowships. She’s one of five Ida B. Wells Fellows, Type Media Center’s program that supports investigative reporters of color. And she is a journalist fellow with the University of Southern California’s Spiritual Exemplars project that explores the role spirituality in humanitarian work.
Through all her stories, Pember seeks to reveal the “real diversity” of the Native community. “We don’t have a monolithic voice,” she says. And she wants her work to make the best use of her time and talent, both for those and for Native women following her path.
“I really have to feel good about it — that I’ve honored the people I’m reporting on and I’m honoring myself as a Native woman,” she says.