This story is about Jennifer Talldeer, a private investigator in Oklahoma, who also happens to be an Osage shaman. Her specialty is finding Native American artifacts and returning them to their original owners. In this story, she’s hired by an insurance company after a construction project goes disastrously wrong, and the developer tries to frame his native workers.
This has been repackaged, so I had to check the publication date, because it’s clearly not recent once you get into it (a complete lack of cell phones was my first give away). It was originally published in 1994, and it shows. It’s not a bad story, but I suspect many native readers wouldn’t be able to finish it – the author completely owns in the note that she’s not an expert, but this is the kind of thing written by a white person that probably wouldn’t get published today. I personally don’t know enough to know if it’s cultural appropriation, but I definitely wondered. Which is a shame – it’s not a bad story, and I would love to read more stories about Native American characters if I knew I could trust they weren’t doing a disservice to actual Native Americans.