"An Indigenous Lara Croft": Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

Image display: A book cover with orange, red, black and green as the main colors, a young Indigenous woman with dark hair, and a title reading Warrior Girl Unearthed.

Warrior Girl Unearthed was written by Angeline Boulley, who is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

Boulley starts the book with a dedication, “For the 108,328 ancestors still held by institutions, and those working to bring them home”. This book directly tackles NAGPRA through the eyes of Perry Firekeeper-Birch. Here is a summary of the book:

Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.

In order to reclaim this inheritance for her people, Perry has no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She can only count on her friends and allies, including her overachieving twin and a charming new boy in town with unwavering morals. Old rivalries, sister secrets, and botched heists cannot - will not - stop her from uncovering the mystery before the ancestors and missing women are lost forever.

Sometimes, the truth shouldn't stay buried.

This book was an incredibly thought-provoking and fun read. I found the content of the story to be very relevant to my area of study, and was intrigued to see what information I could find from it. Some important things to keep in mind: I’m not Native, and my reading of this book isn’t quite as deep as a Native person’s might be. I’m focusing more on the archaeology side of things, but I’ll still discuss other elements that Boulley included.

So what is the archaeology in this book? Well, the most prominent example is that of NAGPRA and the role that universities and Native communities play in the repatriation of ancestors, funerary objects, and other cultural artifacts. NAGPRA allows for federally-funded institutions to have 5 years to catalog and repatriate what they have in their possession, but many still have not fulfilled this duty. In this book, Mackinac State College is among those institutions. Cooper Turtle is working in this book to facilitate the return of the ancestors and cultural artifacts, something that Perry gets roped into as his intern for the summer.

Perry and Cooper interact with both anthropologists and archaeologists. Unfortunately, Boulley doesn’t make much of a distinction between the two, but I believe that it could be explained by this: anthropologists and archaeologists have both had a history of just taking information and artifacts from the Indigenous groups they interacted with. There is also something to be said that Perry isn’t exactly interested in archaeology or anthropology, so the distinction probably isn’t that important to her either.

The archaeologists do play a bit of a “villain” role in this. They’re not necessarily portrayed as “bad” or “evil” – save for one character, but his evilness is tied to the fact that he very much has killed two people rather than the fact that he is an archaeologist. For me, it’s not the weirdest thing that the archaeologists aren’t necessarily “good” in this. The harm archaeology has done to Indigenous communities can’t and shouldn’t be denied, and the way archaeologists are portrayed here reminds readers of that past. Cooper Turtle, while maybe not necessarily an archaeologist, uses archaeology and museum curation to tell the story of his people and the island he came from and represents how archaeology should be used. Perry too, also becomes interested in archaeology though she doesn’t express interest in becoming an archaeologist. The head of the anthropology department at Mackinac State College does tell her that she hopes she pursues archaeology, saying that someone like her (as in, someone passionate about her people) would be a welcome change to the discipline.

Ultimately, the way Boulley uses archaeology and archaeologists in Warrior Girl Unearthed asks us to consider the ways we think about the past and items from it. There is obviously a message that repatriation should and must happen, but also that we understand the circumstances that led to NAGPRA and the effects of those actions on Indigenous communities today.

There is so much more to be said about this book, especially for the way that Boulley talks about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG, or MMIWC2S, or MMIP) incredibly bluntly and she does not shy away from discussing the ways that the United States legal system often does not act in the ways they should in those situations. Just like every other aspect of the book, she leaves an important message regarding this issue.

I’m going to end this review here, with one note: read this book, and then read books about NAGPRA and MMIWG. You will not regret the information you learn.