This American Life

Today I took a long walk and listened to a podcast of This American Life called A Mess To Be Reckoned With. Their website summarizes the story as follows:

Lissa Yellow Bird searches for missing people. Cold cases, mostly. People no one else is looking for. It’s not her job, but a lot of Native Americans go missing and their cases remain unsolved, so families often ask Lissa for help. But then, Lissa’s own niece goes missing.

I highly recommend the story, especially if you are interested in Native America and/or North Dakota and the ways that oil drilling interacts with the Native communities in the area.

Sierra Crane Murdoch, who produced the story, has also written a book about Lissa called Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country. Vanessa Cronin, an Amazon Book Review critic, described the book like this:

Three stories overlap in Yellow Bird and any one of the three would make for an interesting book on its own. Primarily it’s a true crime story about the disappearance and murder of an oil-worker named K.C. Clarke and Lissa Yellow Bird—a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes—who, obsessively some would say, hunted his killer for years. But author Sierra Crane Murdoch also lays out the history of oil drilling on the reservation, the booms and the busts, and the complex legacy of exploitation that shackled the fate of the tribe to that of Big Oil. And finally, Yellow Bird’s also about addiction and recovery, zooming in on the way Lissa, a meth addict fresh out of prison, channeled the same addictive impulses that landed her in prison into the search for K.C. Clarke. And how a case she took on while newly-sober gave her additional purpose: Lissa ended up traveling to conferences across America, calling attention to the high rates at which Indigenous people went missing and to the low resolution rate for such missing person cases. Murdoch’s seven years of research allow for an intimate portrait of a resilient woman who believes she’s “paying a debt to society, making up for the harm she had caused,” making this fascinating story so much more than a true crime tale.