Warrior Girl Unearthed

Perry offers semaa, tobacco, as they cross the St. Mary’s River, as is customary. Before beginning work, she offers semaa to a cedar bush, or “ghiizhik,” breaks off two sprigs, and blesses her insoles with them.

She walks through the museum in the Cultural Learning Center, which recounts Anishnaabe history in both Ojibwemowin and English, to find her supervisor, Cooper Turtle. She sees a basket woven by her maternal great-grandmother, Nokomis Maria. Perry cleans the inside of display cases and hates it so much that she decides to use her break to look for new jobs downtown. The shops and motel she inquires with all turn her away.

After dinner, Perry goes fishing with her five-year-old cousin, Waabun, Daunis’s son. She teaches him how to thank the worms they use as bait in Ojibwemowin. He admires the way she listens to the fish and world around them.

On Friday, Perry and Pauline attend their weekly Friday seminar for all interns, though the latter sits with the Tribal Council interns. Perry is joined by Erik Miller, a to-be freshman at Mackinac State College, and recognizes him from the front desk of the motel that refused to hire her. They’re also joined by Lucas Chippeway, Perry’s oldest friend, and Shense Jackson, a high school senior who attends Malcolm alternative high school with Perry. They nickname their team “Team Misfit Toys.” Over the 10-week internship period, teams compete for a cash bonus.

The after-lunch group challenge is to get one team member across a set of monkey bars while touching as few bars as possible. Team Misfit Toys wins when Perry and Lucas team up using trapeze-style tactics. After work, Shense says her cousin offered Perry a job on his fishing boat, but she should take some time to think about it.

Perry tries to tell Cooper she’s quitting but is waylaid by their trip to Mackinac State College. She attends a meeting with “nearly all male and white” (45) attendees about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The college has 13 Sugar Island ancestors, four from Neebish Island, and one who is unidentified. Dr. Leer-wah shows Perry “Warrior Girl,” who died in her early to mid-teens. Perry has an urge to steal Warrior Girl from the college.

Perry and Cooper head to the office of a white, female anthropology professor named Dr. Raquel Fenton. Fenton insists that she hasn’t had enough time to catalogue the Indigenous remains in the library but refuses Cooper’s offer for help in favor of a “highly skilled assistant” (56). Fenton asks them to open the boxes with her as if it’s a game, but Perry is disturbed by her tone and the items she counts as hers. Perry’s box has unmarked, white heirloom pumpkin seeds, which Perry slips into her pocket. Later, Cooper asks if Perry will help him get Warrior Girl back. She agrees.

Cooper assigns Perry two tasks to complete before Thursday afternoon: Read books about NAGPRA, and create an eBay account to find five Anishnaabe artifacts for sale by private vendors.

The first chapter of one of Perry’s assigned books, Grave Injustice, is about how “Manifest Destiny” was used to justify displacement of Indigenous people. Although she’s interested in the subject matter and her history, she falls asleep reading and wakes up three hours late.

On the ride across the river to return to Sugar Island, Perry includes a thanks to Warrior Girl in her prayers. At home, she opens an eBay account in the name of her dog, Elvis Junior, and finds dozens of Ojibwe items listed for sale.

In the morning, Perry joins her father in his greenhouse, where he’s helping her grow the seeds she repatriated from Fenton’s office. It’s the birthday of “Grandma Cake,” her father’s mother, who passed away when her father was four. Grandma Cake was Black, and her early passing makes Perry feel like her Blackness is “the part of the family that I know the least about” (70). She decides to make molasses tea cake later to honor her.

Perry arrives at work ready to talk to Cooper about the eBay items she found and the book she read. She asks Cooper if she can ask for Warrior Girl’s remains if she proves she’s her lineal descendent. He says that Dr. Leer-Wah says her bones are a thousand years old, and “claims it’s from before Anishnaabeg were in the region” (72). While Fenton is delaying repatriation, Dr. Leer-wah is denying their claim to her entirely. This makes Perry’s heart heavy.

Perry and Pauline make molasses tea cakes after work; when their dad smells them, he’s overcome by emotions about his mother. He thanks them, and as they eat the cakes, he tells them his memories of her.

The Friday meeting is canceled so that the interns can look for the newest missing Anishnaabe woman, Darby O’Malley. Team Misfit Toys, along with Perry’s part-bloodhound, Elvis Junior, are assigned to help a Tribal Police officer search the woods. Perry’s parents taught her to track, and she uses a shirt of Darby’s to help Elvis Junior search for a scent while she draws a map of the area as they walk. Erik is curious about her skills and where he could learn similar things, since his parents didn’t pass down such knowledge to him.

That evening, Pauline tells Perry that Daunis pulled her car up next to her and Chief Manitou and made veiled threats about him getting “blanket-partied if he did anything inappropriate” with Pauline (80). Shortly after, Pauline’s internship was reassigned to Tribal Police. Although her relatives don’t tell her details, Perry knows something “bad” happened to Daunis when she was younger that resulted in the death of her best friend, Lily, who was Lucas’s older sister, and the imprisonment of her brother, Levi.

Erik arrives to hang out, and Perry gives him a tour of her house. She pauses to check on an eBay auction for a birchbark basket, and Erik shows her how to set up eBay and Google alerts. He creates alerts for a breadth of words, and Perry notices his technology skills.

Perry cries angry tears when the item sells. Erik finds out that the seller, Frank Lockhart, lives less than an hour away in St. Ignace. On the ferry, Perry asks bluntly whether they’re on a date; both she and Erik are noncommittal, and when the subject changes, she still doesn’t know, though she thinks that if it’s their “first date, it’s going really well” (90).

When they pull over so that Elvis Junior can relieve himself, Erik says he got expelled from high school for hacking the school website and changing all mentions of their mascot, an “Eskimo,” to a “racially insensitive nickname and image” (91). Perry likes this.

They arrive at Lockhart’s store, a tourist trap filled with offensive racial stereotypes. They joke until Perry sees a woven basket with her great-grandmother’s signature in a display case of genuine Ojibwe items, along with an assembled pipe and a family of moccasins. Overwhelmed, Perry goes to leave. A boy bumps into her, falling and breaking the glass case. When she bends to help him, she takes the basket.

Erik is angry that she took the basket. He’s on probation after hacking his high school; being charged could bankrupt his parents. Perry is also angry and emotional at thinking about how their cultural artifacts get tucked away inside private collections and dusty offices.