genre: young adult fiction
Want to guess how Perry Firekeeper-Birch was NOT planning on spending her summer before her junior year? Interning for her tribe and having to WORK instead of fish and hunt. But when she's in a car accident right when school gets out, an internship is what she has to do in order to pay for the damages. With this internship, though ,Perry learns to have an even deeper respect for her tribal community when she realizes the massive number of ancestors whose bones have never been repatriated back to their tribe and are in museums and collections instead. One ancestor in particular makes Perry's spirit long to do something to protect and defend these ancestors so they can continue on their journey.
I'm a little torn because I liked this book a lot, I feel like it is so important for me to read present day stories about indigenous peoples and their very specific issues. Missing women, stolen land, the bones of ancestors on display for ogling eyes instead of ceremonially buried - these things are real. And these things are upsetting. So I appreciated Perry's fire but sometimes I had a hard time completely suspending my disbelief about some of the plot points. In the end, though, I love reading about this community, the way they honor the earth and each other. I love listening to the audio so I can hear their native language being spoken. I have never really thought much about how upsetting it is to have the bones of your ancestors studied by researchers or collected by opportunists and I appreciate that that's a big part of this story.
It's a good listen.
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