Warrior Girl Unearthed

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2023

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Background

Series Context: The Firekeeper Universe

Content Warning: This section discusses the kidnapping, murder, and rape of Indigenous women and mistreatment of human remains.

The first book in the Firekeeper Universe is Boulley’s 2021 debut novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter. Like Warrior Girl Unearthed, it has elements of mystery, adventure, and romance. It follows Daunis Fontaine, who is 18 at the time. Daunis is deeply connected to her Anishinaabe side but is unenrolled in the tribe and struggles with her maternal side’s white, French ancestry and financial privilege. An epidemic of drug abuse and overdose plagues the Tribe. Over the course of the novel, Daunis’s best friend Lily Chippeway is killed by her ex-boyfriend, who has a substance use disorder. Daunis discovers that her brother’s hockey teammate Jamie and their coach Ron are undercover FBI agents investigating a meth cell operating out of her community. They recruit her as an informant, though her real priority is helping her community.

Daunis eventually discovers that her brother Levi and other members of the hockey team are involved in the cell. Daunis is raped by Grant Edwards, the father of one of the hockey players in the meth ring, Mike. Neither of the Edwards men is ever brought to justice. Levi is sentenced to jail and banished from tribal lands for five years. Levi’s best friend, Stormy Nodin, is sentenced to two years for refusing to testify. While the meth cell is ended, the resolution indicates larger social trends: The Sugar Island Ojibwe Tribe is disproportionately harmed, Indigenous men are imprisoned, and the white men who benefited from committing their crimes on tribal land walk free.

Warrior Girl Unearthed can be read and appreciated without reading Firekeeper’s Daughter, which takes place 10 years earlier. Boulley has said that the Firekeeper Universe will have four books: “Each could be a stand-alone but interconnected, with a different narrator and a mystery that gets wrapped up at the end” (Simeon, Laura. “Angeline Boulley Extends the Firekeeper Universe.” Kirkus Reviews. 2023). Those who have read Firekeeper’s Daughter have knowledge that Perry—who was six during the events of that novel—either doesn’t know or learns over the course of this novel. For instance, early in the book Perry drives past Stormy Nodin, a strange and quiet “traditional healer” who speaks only in Ojibwemowin prayers. While Perry initially dismisses this as an eccentricity, readers of the previous novel know Stormy’s history with the meth cell and how he stopped speaking English when he was called to testify against his best friend, Levi, in federal court.

After Perry sees Edwards talking to Pauline, Pauline says that he was asking her innocent questions, like whether she plays hockey or attends a local college. Those who have read Firekeeper’s Daughter may recall that after raping Daunis, Edwards told her that college hockey players are his “weakness.” Thus, Edwards is now assessing Pauline as a potential target. As Edwards’s death is investigated in Warrior Girl Unearthed, many women who played college hockey protect Daunis from being charged with murder by claiming that they killed Edwards.

While understanding these references isn’t vital, they enrich the complexity of Boulley’s narrative world and the themes she deals with, like the systemic abuse of Indigenous women and the solidarity they form with one another as protection.

Cultural Context: NAGPRA and Repatriation of Indigenous Remains and Cultural Items

Cooper’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA reading list for Perry teaches about “Manifest Destiny, the belief in a divine right to conquer America” and take “the cultural and religious relics of those considered less than human” (63). This aspect of American history led to Perry’s ancestors’ remains and their possessions being largely held by instructions like museums, federal agencies, and colleges rather than by the tribes they belong to. This phenomenon went unaddressed by federal legislation until 1990, when NAGPRA was passed. NAGPRA provides funds for institutions to catalog and return “human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony” (“Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act.” Bureau of Land Management). While NAGPRA gave institutions five years to send inventories to local tribes, it also allowed extensions if an institution could prove that it was making “good faith efforts” in repatriating its catalog. Cooper and Perry see how loosely institutions interpret that in practice through Fenton, whose cataloging is federally recognized as good faith but who puts off Cooper’s requests to help or to give her funding for assistance, while claiming that she doesn’t have the resources to complete her inventories.

NAGPRA created a framework for the discovery of Indigenous human remains or cultural objects after 1990. An individual “must provide immediate telephone notification of the inadvertent discovery, with written confirmation, to the responsible Federal agency official with respect to Federal lands, and, with respect to tribal lands, to the responsible Indian tribe official” (“§ 10.4 Inadvertent discoveries.” Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Regulations, Title 43, Subtitle A, 1995). Any items found before 1990 aren’t subject to NAGPRA: This is the detail that determines whether Lockhart’s collection of human remains and cultural objects are illegal or not. Midway through the novel, Lockhart turns over to Mackinac those items in his collection that were found before 1990. However, Perry finds a large collection of ancestral remains and cultural objects in his silo that were likely found after 1990. Claire eventually confirms that Lockhart’s intent was to “sell […] overseas to private collectors” to escape federal jurisdiction (379).

Social Context: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S)

Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people from tribes across the US go missing and are murdered at a disproportionate rate. Boulley’s novel calls this an “epidemic.” This type of epidemic is a “social epidemic,” a “behaviorally based non-communicable disease” (Magarey, Roger D., and Christina M. Trexler. “Information: A Missing Component in Understanding and Mitigating Social Epidemics.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 7, no. 128, 2020). It refers to the widespread abuse, kidnapping, and murder of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.

This treatment is one iteration of the systemic abuse of Indigenous people that has continued since colonial times. Perry thinks about the origin of this frame of mind when she thinks about Columbus, “who got lost and discovered a ‘new world’ full of resources: Indigenous peoples he could enslave to work in gold mines and on plantations,” adding that these included “‘Indians’ to be trafficked, just another resource to be extracted from the land” (263). She sees a straight line from then to now, envisioning herself displayed “in a glass case marked INDIAN MAIDEN, CIRCA 2014” (95). Eventually, she becomes part of this epidemic herself as Leer-wah kidnaps and displays her.

MMIWG2S cases often aren’t reported by popular news media or federal databases and aren’t given the investigative resources that other homicides are. Over the 10 weeks the novel covers, four Indigenous women, including Perry, are missing or murdered. When Shense goes missing, a non-Tribal police officer says, “Maybe you should talk with Tribal Police […] Seems to me they should be looking after their own” (316). This dismissiveness, even though Shense’s case is outside Tribal jurisdiction, is characteristic of how missing-persons cases for Indigenous women are often dismissed.

When Uniting Three Fires Against Violence comes to visit Perry’s internship, they make a “point” about adding girls and two-spirit people to the common acronym MMIW, making it MMIWG2S. Girls refers to a child or teenaged female. Two-spirit “is a Pan-Indian umbrella term for American Indians who identify outside the male and female gender binary” (“Stop Stealing Our Spirits.” Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman: A Digital Exhibition). Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people are three times more likely to be murdered than white women, and two times more likely to be raped; of the almost 6,000 reported MMIWG2S in the National Crime Information Center, “the U.S Department of Justice missing persons database has only reported 116 cases” (Bartley, Felicia. “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women.” Native Women’s Wilderness). Besides indicating the lack of resources given to MMIWG2S, this statistic is problematic because the “majority of these murders are committed by non-Native people on Native-owned land” (Bartley). As Boulley’s novel shows through events such as Edwards’s rape of Daunis, Tribal Police “lack jurisdiction to arrest, charge and prosecute non-Natives—whether they’re speeding or committing a violent crime on tribal land” (Maher, Savannah. “Supreme Court Rules Tribal Police Can Detain Non-Natives, But Problems Remain.” NPR, 2021). This makes it difficult to prosecute those who perpetrate the abuse.