Warrior Girl Unearthed is a sequel of sorts to Boulley’s debut novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter. Perhaps not quite as good as Firekeeper’s Daughter, nonetheless I still enjoyed reading Warrior Girl Unearthed and wish there had been more novel to read. I appreciate the opportunity to revisit the Ojibwe community on Sugar Island, Michigan, and the characters from the first novel. I hope Boulley writes more novels about them.

The protagonist of Warrior Girl Unearthed is Perry Firekeeper-Birch, the cousin of Daunis Fontaine, the protagonist of Firekeeper’s Daughter. In Firekeeper’s Daughter, Perry was just a little kid, but in Warrior Girl Unearthed she is sixteen years old. She is a laid-back, troublemaker who has no ambitions to leave Sugar Island while her over-achieving twin, Pauline, dreams of going away to college. Perry has plans to spend her summer relaxing and fishing, but instead she is forced to participate in her tribe’s summer internship program where she is assigned to work in the tribal museum.

It is through her internship that Perry learns about how public institutions who have been hoarding Indigenous cultural relics and ancestral remains are required to repatriate them to the tribes that they came from under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but have not been doing so as they can use the designation of “culturally unidentifiable” as an excuse to keep hoarding the artifacts. One such institution is the nearby Mackinac State College, which has numerous Indigenous artifacts still to be catalogued and repatriated, including the intact remains of a young girl that they call “Warrior Girl”, who Perry immediately feels a connection to. This leads to Perry finding her life’s purpose: to bring Warrior Girl, and all the other ancestral remains that have been stolen from their graves, home.

While her internship supervisor counsels patience and going through the proper channels, Perry’s methods of repatriation are more impulsive and illegal. Still, Perry is an engaging heroine with a good heart. I think what is most admirable about Perry and Indigenous peoples is their great sense of community and their respect for their ancestors, even those who are long deceased. White people, on the other hand, are lacking in respect for the dead or their ancestors. White history is full of people robbing graves for jewellery and other riches, robbing graves to sell bodies to medical students for dissection, robbing graves of non-white people to display their bodies in museums or private collections. Just think for a second about how disturbing it is that white people have no compunction about disturbing someone’s final resting place, or trading human remains like currency, or putting the remains on display. This is why I plan on being cremated.

While Firekeeper’s Daughter is a murder mystery, Warrior Girl Unearthed becomes a heist novel in Perry’s pursuit to bring her ancestors home, but Boulley also ties into the story the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls which has been rightly forced into the spotlight through the REDress Project. Just as researchers and collectors covet the remains of Indigenous people, men covet and brutalize the bodies Indigenous women and girls, including women in Perry’s own community. I do not think it should take entire movements or novels like this one to make people empathize with Indigenous peoples, but we do not live in an empathetic world. I hope readers will be compelled to read Boulley’s novels not just for entertainment, but because they have a desire to learn about and to respect the beliefs of Indigenous peoples.