June Book Recommendation:

Indian Burial Ground

written by Nick Medina

Reviewed by Carlee Wilson

I love a good Indigenous thriller, and Nick Medina’s Indian Burial Ground was definitely a thrill to read. Medina drops his readers into the humid atmosphere of Louisiana and uses the fictional Takoda Reservation as the backdrop for his characters’ journeys of confounding loss. The novel is more than a thriller, though, as Medina seamlessly blends horror, supernatural elements, and a whodunnit spirit, pushing his reader page by page to get the answers we’re craving.

Indian Burial Ground introduces us to an assortment of characters through the eyes of Noemi and Louie. While Noemi’s boyfriend is tragically killed under questionable circumstances, Louie—her estranged uncle—has returned to the reservation and remembers a series of mysterious deaths from his teenage years in the late 1980s. Could they be connected?

I especially loved how Medina flips the settler-introduced “Indian burial ground” trope. Instead of Natives being blamed for curses and hauntings experienced by settlers, the Takoda Reservation’s residents suspect they’ve acquired a vampire (vampires were introduced to us via European folklore). In the thoughts of Louie and other children, the vampire becomes the only logical reason for the unexplainable occurrences, an evil they don’t recognize and therefore must not belong to them.

I really appreciate how Medina didn’t shy away from the issues that plague our communities. The novel is a reminder that these issues (alcoholism, suicide, mental health) aren’t just experiences of a select few but overlapping events that affect us all. My only complaint about the novel is its length, but it was definitely worth it.

hayu masi to Berkley Books and Penguin Random House for the advanced access to Indian Burial Ground, which was released in print on April 16, 2024.

Buy the book from Tribal member owned Time Enough Books