Current Reading: Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch

 

I am currently reading Yellow Bird: Oil, murder, and a woman's search for justice in Indian country by Sierra Crane Murdoch. The book is, at heart, a true crime story. But it goes into great detail about the North Dakota oil boom, the Fort Berthold Indian reservation, domestic violence, addiction and recovery, and the challenges of trying to find justice in Indian country. 

This American Life did an hour long program based on this story. 

And the times had a positive review of the book. Here is an excerpt:

There is nothing simple about reservations, just as there is nothing simple about the country in which our tribal nations are situated. The cultural landscape is an elaborate and crumpled fabric. But in 2012 at Fort Berthold a tribe member named Lissa Yellow Bird began pulling at the threads. What happened to Clarke? Did James Henrikson, the steroid-jacked owner of Blackstone with his wife, Sarah Creveling, have anything to do with it? What role did Tex Hall play in all of this? Was Clarke’s disappearance a symptom of white people doing dirty business on the reservation, and were tribe members complicit in the violence that blossomed around the oil boom? These questions gnawed at Lissa Yellow Bird and, as the journalist Sierra Crane Murdoch recounts in her remarkable first book, “Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country,” eventually came to consume her.

Yellow Bird, as Murdoch presents her, is a vivid character. A middle-aged mother of five, she had, as we say on the rez, lived large. She was a “fanatic with a bleeding heart.” Her daughter Shauna referred to her as an addict, an assessment Yellow Bird seems to have agreed with. She had worked as a stripper, prison guard, bartender and welder. And she had served two years in prison on drug charges.

Read the rest of the review here.