You know what doesn't make sense about Stephen King using the "Indian burial ground" trope regarding the hotel. He also says that the hotel was made around the early 1900s and the builders had to "fight off" Natives protecting the grounds, but a lot of the tribes that traditionally lived in that area were plains or somewhat nomadic, and a lot of nomadic Tribes would hold funerals for dead bodies near where they died, leave the body there, and then any other nomadic tribes would know not to camp there until there was no trace of the body.
So how is it an "Ancient Indian burial" ground.... on top of a mountain? That isn't really a prime location for making camp (thus someone likely wouldn't have died there, nevermind it being a large graveyard) save for maybe like very specific circumstances. And King's story is insinuating there were still Natives there & still living very traditionally despite such practices being illegal. A lot of tribes were also displaced to Reservations at this point. This leaves us with several options for explanation:
- The Overlook manager was full of shit & that wasn't actually a burial ground there but he's playing up the history of the hotel & that also explains the appropriation of Indigenous art within the hotel
- The location of the Overlook hotel was not built on specifically a burial ground but the mountain & area itself held some kind of special cultural/spiritual significance to the tribes there, who likely protested in some way of the Overlook being built there because of that but not exactly in the way it was described
- In King's world, there was a Native American reservation located there (& this would explain Native people living in such a weirdly specific area & wanting to defend it) that the Overlook hotel then trespassed on solely to build a hotel & this reservation is never brought up or elaborated upon but no longer exists
- The builders of the Overlook happened upon a Nation of tribe/s living on that mountain that were still living traditionally as in pre-contact despite the U.S laws a la Last of the Dogmen & maybe there WAS a burial ground there because of that isolation but the Hotel management pushed this Indian Nation out solely to build a hotel
All of these explanations are crazy but the REAL answer is that King used faux Indian mysticism to explain why this hotel is cursed because of laziness & left it at that