Warrior Girl Unearthed

Perry’s identical twin and foil is Pauline Firekeeper-Birch. Perry calls her the “nice twin.” Whereas Perry is brash and outspoken, Pauline is polite and academically ambitious. She’s the first high-school intern ever placed with Tribal Council. Pauline is removed from her internship with Chief Manitou after Daunis catches him and Pauline in a car alone and threatens to “blanket-party” him if he abuses her. Pauline decides to “shun” Daunis for confronting Chief Manitou; to believe he chose her as his intern because he planned to abuse her would mean that it wasn’t her intelligence or drive that set her apart from her peers. Pauline isn’t ready to acknowledge the reality of her situation until Chapter 24, when she learns what “grooming” is. This is an early example of the types of abuses Indigenous women face and the way their fellow Indigenous women protect them.

Pauline’s ambition negatively affects her in other ways. She struggles with “anxiety” and “self-medicates” with “weed candy” (77-78). Perry notes that Pauline’s “anxiety has levels, like military defense readiness” ranging from “DEFCON 5” to “DEFCON 1” (35). DEFCON 1 means that Pauline is “pulling out individual strands of hair until there is a dime-sized bald patch behind her left ear” (35). At the novel’s end, Pauline tells Perry that she has “trichotillomania,” which she’s finding more healthy ways to cope with.

Despite their differences, Perry and Pauline are close. Perry is the only person who knows about Pauline’s nighttime “sneaky snags,” and Perry worries about her sister’s safety. Even when they squabble, they quickly mend things by calling each other “Egg,” an affectionate nickname that shows how Perry and Pauline continue to see each other as their other half.

Perry’s love interest, Erik Miller, is an important secondary character. He has light-brown hair and blue eyes. Unlike the rest of Team Misfit Toys, he didn’t grow up immersed in Anishinaabe culture. When he introduces himself, he calls himself and his mom “tribal members.” Perry corrects him by saying: “Tribal citizens. Members belong to clubs. Citizens belong to nations” (29). Erik never takes offense at such corrections but embraces them. At one point, Erik calls himself a “white hat,” a term for a hacker who uses computer skills “for the greater good” (92). Perry asks whether that makes “black hats the bad hackers,” and asks, “Don’t you think those terms are racist? White, good; black, bad?” (92). After considering Perry’s words, Erik says that now that she’s pointed out that paradigm, he wants to be more “mindful” of the words he uses. Perry is charmed by the way Erik “took in a new idea and treated it with care” (92), when so often she receives both anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism.

Erik’s words about hacking follow his confession that he’s on probation because he hacked the high school website to replace their “Eskimo” mascot with the words “racially insensitive nickname and image” (91). Because of his probation, Erik gets angry when Perry involves him in her theft-based repatriation of black ash baskets without thinking what being caught would mean for Erik’s future. Since one of Erik’s key characteristics is his willingness to learn, he rethinks his anger after hearing the Elders talk about what black ash baskets mean to them: “It wasn’t just about a basket. They’re talking about more than that. I know seeing your great-grandmother’s basket brought up a lot of emotions for you. I’m just starting to learn what it means. But I understand why you did it” (165). Erik is always open to new information that might change his mind or perspective.

In addition, Erik is caring and understanding. He’s mad at Perry when he thinks she told Web about his probation but amends his feelings when he realizes that Web found out the information to coerce him into participating in the heist some other way. When Web coerces Perry as well, Erik wipes her tears and tells her, “It will be okay, Perry. We’ll do this” (345), even though his probation means that he’d get in more trouble than the others if they’re caught. At the novel’s end, after charges are filed against Web, Claire, and Lockhart and the ancestors are returned to the Tribe, Erik formally becomes Perry’s boyfriend.

An important secondary character, Shense Jackson becomes Perry’s close friend. Perry often goes on drives with Shense and her infant daughter, Washkeh. While Perry rarely talks to Pauline about Erik, she often talks to Shense about him. In turn, Shense talks to Perry about the struggles of co-parenting and determining custody. She calls Perry her “ride or die,” and they call each other “niijiikwe” (277), an Ojibwemowin term of affection between female friends.

Shense’s father is head of security for the local casino. Later, Perry finds out that Claire put Shense in Team Misfit Toys along with her, Pauline, and Lucas because of Shense’s knowledge of getting around security systems. While they prepare for the heist, though, they don’t know they’re being manipulated. Shense wants to participate in the heist for Washkeh’s sake, so that her daughter “will know some battles are worth fighting” (277).

While checking on the security systems for the heist, Shense goes missing. When Perry is also kidnapped, she wakes up imprisoned in a hidey-hole with Shense, who has been there for four days, surviving on her own breast milk. Shense has their internship recorder and has been recording messages to Washkeh. Because Shense used her ingenuity to survive in the hole, she can give Perry all the information she needs to figure out where they are and who the wiindigoo is.

The twins’ childhood friend and Pauline’s love interest, Lucas Chippaway is an important secondary character. He’s from a prominent Sugar Island family. His older sister, Lily, was Daunis’s best friend and was killed by her ex-boyfriend in the events of Firekeeper’s Daughter. His great-grandmother, “Granny June,” is an Elder who plays a role in both Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed.

Lucas has bronze skin and a “compact, muscular body” (6). He’s outgoing, charming, and loyal. Several times when he sees Perry from across the room, he “struts the entire length like a male runway model, Blue Steel and all” (28). He calls her “Pear-Bear” and she calls him her “best buddy.” Perry loves him “as a genuinely good person and for always being there for me” (319). Perry and Lucas’s close and cooperative relationship is one of the things that catches Claire and Web’s attention when they’re trying to decide which interns to manipulate into performing a heist.

Perry realizes that Lucas is “in love” with Pauline, who thinks their relationship is casual. Perry fears that “Pauline will break his heart” (287), which will transform her into the “sister of the girl who broke his heart” (319). However, because of Lucas’s history, he’s extremely protective of the women in his life, so thematically, Lily’s murder makes him highly attuned to The Epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. When Perry tells him that Shense is missing, Lucas “beats my twin and me to the front door” (319) in his eagerness to help.

At the novel’s end, Lucas decides that the “only way the friendship” with Pauline will work “was to discontinue the benefits” (384). The only person he tells about his true “heartbreak” over Pauline not wanting to be his girlfriend is Perry, showing the persevering strength of their friendship.

An important secondary character, Stormy Nodin is a traditional healer for the Sugar Island Ojibwe Tribe. In high school, Stormy was best friends and hockey teammates with Daunis’s younger brother, Levi Firekeeper. Stormy was vital to the events of Firekeeper’s Daughter, when he helped free Daunis and an undercover FBI agent named Jamie after they were captured by people running a meth cell, including Stormy and Levi.

Stormy’s prison sentence drastically changed his character. Perry remembers when Stormy and Levi were “two smart-asses always goofing off and getting into mischief” (148). Since returning from prison, Stormy has been “silent and solitary” (148). He speaks only in Ojibwemowin and “only to pray” (11). At the beginning of the novel, Perry notices him walking along the side of the road and stops to invite him to the Firekeeper-Birch house for dinner. While many consider Stormy eccentric, Perry respects his cultural knowledge. Without her knowing, Stormy recommends Perry as Cooper’s intern.

Stormy becomes an ally to Perry’s heist and a member of “Team Heist Misfits.” His role is to help put the ancestors to rest once Perry and her crew rescue them from Lockhart’s silo. Since he isn’t in on Web and Lockhart’s plan, he becomes a wild card. In the chaos of the heist, he disappears. The novel doesn’t reveal where he went or how he’s rediscovered, though he returns in the final chapter to help Cooper return their reclaimed ancestors to the earth.

Perry’s mentor, Cooper Turtle, is an important secondary character who runs the cultural museum for the Tribe. Although he’s called “Kooky Cooper” (15), Perry clarifies that he isn’t “mean or creepy. Just an oddball” (37). Since the Sugar Island Cultural Learning Center was moved off Sugar Island to downtown Sault Ste. Marie, he protests every time he’s on the ferry across the river by posing “like an old-timey cigar-store Indian statue bidding baamaapii to the island of our Anishinaabe ancestors” (14). Perry doesn’t understand why he keeps up this protest while being so “by-the-book” about repatriating their ancestors and cultural items from Mackinac.

The contrast between Cooper’s patient and legalistic approach to repatriation and Perry’s reactionary, sometimes illegal approach creates conflict between them. Cooper reassigns Perry after she admits that she stole pumpkin seeds from Fenton’s office. Cooper is brutally honest with Perry, telling her that she jeopardized the future repatriation of their ancestors.

By the end of the novel, after realizing that Web manipulated her passion, Perry realizes why Cooper wanted her to approach repatriation with caution and information. As Perry tells Daunis at the novel’s end, she wants to work part-time with Cooper, who recommended that she apply as a museum studies major at “the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe” (387), implying that he’d become her mentor again.

An important secondary character, Tom Webster is Perry’s second mentor and Cooper’s foil. Whereas Cooper expects his interns to be structured and well-informed, Web immediately encourages Perry to follow her passions and pursue “independent study.” Perry assumes (and the novel implies) that Web’s treatment indicates that she’s “valued.” When Perry begins her internship, she tells Web offhand that she thinks Lockhart has “illegal items.” Later, Web encourages Perry to explore Lockhart’s land, looking for where their stolen ancestors might be located. At the time, the novel implies that Perry is finally receiving support from an adult who has the institutional power to help her.

Two big plot twists involve Web. The first is how he extorts Erik and Perry into going through with the heist. At the time, Perry thinks the reason is that he’ll do anything it takes to repatriate their ancestors. However, the novel later reveals that “Frank Lockhart recruited” Web and Claire, and “using the interns to steal everything” was Web’s idea (379). This second plot twist shows that his true motivations were selfish. This selfishness continues when he agrees to testify against Lockhart and Claire to alleviate his own sentence.

The protagonist and narrator of Firekeeper’s Daughter, Daunis is an important secondary character in Warrior Girl Unearthed. While she’s technically Perry and Pauline’s cousin on their Firekeeper side, they both consider her their “Auntie.”

Daunis opens up to Perry about how she was raped by Grant Edwards. This makes the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S) newly personal to Perry and introduces the symbol of the wiindigoo, which Daunis uses to explain how men dehumanize, objectify, and consume Indigenous women’s bodies.

Daunis’s openly antagonistic relationship with Edwards makes her the prime suspect in the investigation of his murder, especially because he was killed minutes after Daunis threatened to “end” him unless he stayed away from the twins. In Daunis’s first trial, many women from the Sugar Island Ojibwe Tribe in the audience stand and claim, “I killed Grant Edwards” (237). This solidarity shows how women band together to protect one another when the legal system doesn’t. At the novel’s end, Daunis tells Perry that she and TJ are having a daughter, adding another generation of “warrior girl” to their family.

An anthropologist at Mackinac State College, Raquel Fenton is a minor antagonist. While she doesn’t commit crimes like Lockhart, Edwards, or Web, she sees the Ojibwe people through both an exoticized and scientific lens, as if they’re her objects of study rather than real people. When Chief Manitou brings his cousin Rocky out to do a traditional dance, she regards Rocky as if he’s “a cover-art model for romance novels about Indian braves and Zhaaganaash women” (108). This quotation shows how she romanticizes and exoticizes Ojibwe people.

Fenton purposefully stalls the repatriation process by claiming that she doesn’t have the resources to complete her inventory, even though Cooper presents her with many potential solutions. She gives Perry a box of her ancestors’ cultural items to open, saying that it “will be like Christmas” (55). This shows how she trivializes serious matters. Fenton’s role as a minor antagonist is complicated near the end of the novel. After Perry yelled at Fenton during Lockhart’s announcement, Fenton started thinking about “how I might have felt had the situation been reversed” (339). She encourages Perry to get into her field, which she realizes needs “fresh ideas and passionate energy” (339), and even offers to write her a letter of recommendation. This shows that some people can change deeply held stereotypes and opinions.

Leer-wah’s real name is Hugo LeRoy. Because of what Perry calls the “pretentious pronunciation of an ordinary last name” (107), she thinks his name is “Leer-wah” until seeing it in writing. Like Fenton, Leer-wah is an anthropologist at Mackinac State College. Unlike Fenton, he at first seems genuinely interested in learning about Ojibwe culture. When he takes over as head of the repatriation team, his priority is setting a hard, one-year deadline for repatriating the 13 Sugar Island ancestors. However, this act hides the fact that he’s the person kidnapping and imprisoning Anishinaabe women, making him a primary antagonist.

When Perry meets him, she thinks Leer-wah looks like “a fussy Monopoly dude except he’s younger and his hair is red instead of white” (49). Perry assumes that he’s “Zaaganaash,” or white, until she realizes that Leer-wah trapped her in a hidey-hole once used to hide Anishinaabe children and thus prevent them from being taken to boarding schools. This leads Perry to realize that he has knowledge of the land. Putting together several pieces of information she noticed over the past 10 weeks, she realizes that Leer-wah’s “mom is Ojibwe” and that he’s Claire’s cousin (370). As a child, Leer-wah found Claire’s mom, Caron, in the same pit that Perry and Shense were in; Caron’s skeleton is still in the pit with them. Perry realizes that this sparked Leer-wah’s desire to “collect and observe” them (366). Leer-wah’s fetishistic treatment of Indigenous women represents the most extreme version of what can result from systemic dehumanization.

Despite being one of the novel’s primary antagonists, Frank Lockhart appears in only one scene in the book. His power as a white man with money living among a population of systemically disenfranchised Ojibwe people results in his outsized presence in the novel, since he has taken advantage of this disenfranchisement. Two settings in which the abuse of Perry’s ancestors culminate belong to Lockhart: Teepees-n-Trinkets and the silo.

Erik and Perry call Teepees-n-Trinkets “Stereotypes and Souvenirs” (92). It’s filled with offensive anti-Indigenous stereotypes to sell to tourists. Part of the store displays “genuine” artifacts. Perry is shocked to see a ceremonial pipe, which isn’t “supposed to be assembled outside of ceremony” (93). She also sees black ash baskets made by her own grandmother and moccasins. Seeing the family moccasins makes Perry wonder what happened to the people who the moccasins belong to and eventually leads her to suspect that Lockhart has a secret collection of Indigenous remains. Perry discovers that Lockhart’s silo contains 42 bodies of her ancestors, articulated and wired into shadow boxes. They’re arranged around the silo, in which a swiveling chair sits in the middle so that Lockhart can view them from any angle.

Lockhart claims that his “treasures” were acquired before 1990 and thus aren’t subject to NAGPRA. When he tricks the Tribe into thinking that he’s repatriating their items but surprises everyone by giving the items to Mackinac instead to spite Edwards, he reveals that he doesn’t truly have respect for Indigenous peoples or the items that belong to them but simply sees them as tools. He still maintains this perspective at the novel’s end, when he reverses his decision once again. Perry knows he didn’t do it because “it’s the right thing to do” but because “he is looking for any actions that might bode well for him when his case goes to court” (385). Unlike Fenton, an antagonist who adopts a new perspective and begins to question the ethics of her own actions, Lockhart doesn’t grow or change.