A review by wchereads
Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina

challenging dark emotional tense

Note: this review will not be spoiler free because I don't know how to talk about it otherwise.

CW: mentions of suicide and alcoholism

The author wrote in the "acknowledgements":

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge the two horrific and heartbreaking themes that run through this book - suicide and alcoholism - specifically in regard to their prevalence among Native and Indigenous peoples.

In Indian Burial Ground, lots of people in the community died in inexplicable and horrifying ways due to the influence of a spirit. It was heartbreaking and unsettling to read, but I wasn't sure why that was the case. I didn't make the connection with the equally heartbreaking and bafflingly high suicide rate in indigenous communities. It IS a supernatural twist that a three-year-old child would climb into fire and had the stength to rival a teen; but indigenous children as young as ten to twelve years old ARE taking their own lives and the cause may be multi-layered but definitely not supernatutal. 

With that in mind, Louie's battle with the alligator is even more heartwrenching the more I think about it. This was a truly haunting read and my wish is that more people start paying attention to the HUGE amount of issues that indigenous communities face and how western settler colonial government is routinely failing them - or, to be more truthful, actually causing all their challenges and problems: from air pollution, to unclean water, to racism, to racially motivated violence, to the racist and violent police system, to lack of public schools... 

🗣️from turtle island to palestine🗣️
🗣️we demand land back🗣️