Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  Madeleine and Willard moved to White Shield. There were no trees or coulees to block the wind, and whenever they went outside, the cold cut through their clothing. Many people would cry for their loss, but not Madeleine, who in those years did not cry much at all. “I felt really sad about it,” she would say, “but, you know, when the government wants something, they take it.”

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  NOT LONG AFTER Madeleine moved into the newest house, the basement flooded, destroying boxes of old photographs. Among the few that had been saved was a portrait of Madeleine and Willard taken a year before Irene was born. They stood by a fence in Elbowoods on a blustery day, Madeleine in heels and a dark, slim dress, Willard in a button-down and an undershirt. They were close but not touching, laughing but in different ways. Willard cast his eyes to the ground, while Madeleine looked straight into the camera.

  A relative made copies of the photograph and distributed them at the reunion one summer. Lissa hung hers above the desk in her apartment, where she saw it whenever she walked in. “Grandpa’s got that shy, puppy love,” she observed, “and she’s just like, What’s up? And look at them shoes! Grandma was stylin’.”

  The circumstances of the photograph added to its nostalgia. Lissa felt proud of having come from such handsome people, but her pride was muddied by the bitterness of knowing how soon her grandparents’ lives changed. After the flood, the unemployment rate on the reservation rose to 70 percent. The only jobs available were with the Bureau or the tribe, and the tribe’s only income came from federal appropriations, the leasing of its pastures, and several small settlements it had lobbied for and won to account for the loss of the bottomlands. Never had the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara been so dependent on the U.S. government. Since the land to which they had been moved was dry and infertile, families no longer grew their own food, relying on surplus “commodities” such as flour, oil, canned vegetables, and processed cheese and meat. Some families tried to live on the land allotted to them, but without water or electricity or neighbors around, the living was almost impossible. In 1967, 81 percent of people living on the reservation had to haul water to their homes from a half mile or more away. Most families moved to housing clusters such as those in White Shield, erected in each reservation segment, or to already established towns, like New Town and Parshall. Willard drove buses for the White Shield school and worked for the tribe, and although YB’s drew some income, Madeleine was generous with credit, particularly toward relatives who could not afford food. The store lost money, and in 2000, two years after Willard died, Madeleine shut the store down.

  It was due to this poverty that Lissa’s grandmother believed the drinking set in. Lissa had heard various theories about the drinking. Some said it had been a problem since fur traders brought liquor to the plains, while others thought it began with World War II. No one denied the war had made it worse. Among various men who returned from the war, drinking was a common pastime. Madeleine had three uncles who fought in France and in Okinawa, and the one her age—sixteen when he left—came home an alcoholic. He had developed a taste for liquor in battle, he told her, thinking it would make him braver. Madeleine believed him, though she did not believe the war was wholly or even largely to blame. Her husband had never gone to war, nor had her father, and both drank. Madeleine blamed the drinking on the flood.

  When Lissa was born in 1968, White Shield had existed for sixteen years. Her memory of the reservation began four years later, after her stepfather, Willy Phillips, was murdered in Oakland, and she returned to North Dakota with her mother.

  In Bismarck, Irene worked as a secretary at a tribal college while Lissa attended school. Lissa spent many weekends in White Shield, the reservation largely foreign to her. She was two years younger than her mother’s other child, Cory, whom Madeleine had taken to raise as her own son, and roughly the same age as her uncles Loren and Rodney. The four of them went everywhere together. To wander so freely across the reservation was a novelty to Lissa, and she moved with righteous curiosity. In Bismarck, she had few relatives apart from an aunt and cousin who lived in an adjacent apartment, so she spent much of her time in the company of her mother’s friends, most of them white lawyers and professors. Lissa was good at making conversation with these friends, at offering coffee when they visited and answering their questions, but she never felt the city belonged to her in the way the reservation did.

  The longer Lissa lived between the city and the reservation, the more complicated her perception of both places became. Lissa was the only Native American in her first-grade class, so each return to Bismarck felt like a return to hostile territory. The students called her “yellow turd,” “yellow piss,” “blackie,” “blanket ass,” and “squaw.” Often boys followed her home, yelling “Indians are dirty” and “Indians are drunks.”

  The more Lissa heard these things, the more she believed they were true, and each time she returned to the reservation, it revealed itself to her in sharper relief. She saw that some of her relatives were indeed dirty; that their hair was long and uncombed; that their houses were crowded and in disarray. She noticed empty liquor bottles, the relatives off-kilter, heard whisperings that so-and-so drank himself to sleep.

  The reservation became her paradox, a source of her shame but also the place where she felt most free. In a sense, the reservation saved her. One day in Bismarck, when she was six years old, the boys who followed her from school caught up. They punched her, pulled her hair, tore apart her shoes. As soon as Irene took one look at Lissa, she had gone searching for the boys, and when she did not find them, she called a friend, a lawyer, who threatened to sue the school on her behalf. Irene also called her dad, Willard, and when Lissa returned to White Shield the next weekend, her uncles had been ready. They padded her fists with socks and cinched tape around her wrists. They showed her how to kick and punch and how to slip from choke holds. All that weekend they had fought, in the fields and in the house, and the next week, when the boys followed Lissa home again, she hurt them, and they ran away.

  Her mother would say Lissa had been a precocious child before she could even speak. At seven months old—when Irene regained custody—Lissa learned to propel herself out of her crib. At eight months, she learned to walk, and then it had not seemed long before Lissa spoke in whole sentences. She plied Irene with questions, her curiosity unflagging, and she was clever, always discovering ways to thwart her mother’s rules. After Bismarck, they had moved to Minot, where Irene enrolled again in college. She would often try to study at night after she put Lissa to bed, but instead of sleeping, Lissa would lie awake with a handheld mirror, cocked at an angle to watch her mother work. Lissa had so much energy as a child that she often got in trouble in school. Her mother took her to psychologists, one of whom recommended testing and, upon seeing the results, concluded that Lissa was bored, her intelligence unusually high.

  When Lissa was young, these qualities endeared people to her, but as she grew older, her precociousness hardened into defiance, and her defiance broke into a reckless rage that scared even her own mother. Lissa was thirteen when they moved to Milwaukee with Irene’s husband, Wayne White Eagle, where she developed a habit of pulling fire alarms and stealing her mother’s things. Among the items she stole were photographs Irene had saved to make an album to give to Lissa when she was older, but Lissa had resolved to not grow old, to kill herself or disappear, and it was not long after they arrived in Milwaukee that Lissa ran away. She was found living with a Laotian family in another part of the city. When Lissa refused to come home, Irene called her brother Chucky for advice, who told her to report the family to Lutheran Social Services. It worked; the family kicked Lissa out. She was sent to South Dakota, to the Flandreau Indian School, and then to Fort Berthold to live with her uncle Michael. When her mother got a job in behavioral science at the medical school in Grand Forks, Lissa joined her there. One day, Lissa and Irene got in a fight. Irene
fell, and Wayne called the police. Lissa was committed to a psychiatric ward, where she remained for weeks until Michael came and got her. She was sixteen years old.

  If the reservation had been her paradox when she was younger, as she grew older, it became her only constant. In all her flitting from one city to another, the reservation always took her back.

  After the fight with her mother, Lissa took a break from school, and it was decided among her relatives that she would care for her great-grandmother, Nellie Red Fox. Nellie was bone-thin, hard as a statue, with a prominent nose and a wide, square jaw and eyes that blinked like a deer’s. She wore cataract glasses on account of her diabetes, the lenses shaped like marbles sliced in half. As a child, Lissa made fun of the glasses that so many elders on the reservation wore, which made them all look like bugs. When the glasses had fallen out of fashion, Lissa had wondered, Did the aliens claim their people? But Lissa knew where the glasses came from: They came from the flood, which had brought diabetes by replacing farms with convenience stores and commodity trucks and by destroying the hospital, which the U.S. government had promised, but had yet, to replace.

  The year Lissa moved in with her great-grandmother, Nellie’s diabetes worsened. Her toe became infected and then was amputated, and Nellie was bound to a wheelchair. Each morning, as Lissa later wrote in her journal, “Grandma would wheel herself into my room.”

  “Say! You can’t sleep all day,” all whipping some kind of towel or material at me because her chair couldn’t get close enough for her to wiggle me to get my attention. She would get me on task. “So and so is going to be here today, so straighten up. Make some coffee. Boil some meat.” She would get on the phone and start to check in with people. “Say, are you coming?” She would dial up someone else on her rotary phone. “Say! This is Nellie. Are you going to stop over?” “Say” was her favorite word to get your attention.

  Nellie’s husband, Charles Yellow Bird, had died years before the flood attempting to save two boys who fell in the river. But Nellie never seemed lonely. She recruited her grandchildren to chauffeur her across the reservation to visit relatives or to attend prayer meetings. Sometimes these meetings were Arikara ceremonies, but more often they were Christian revivals, where devotees laid hands on one another’s backs and sang and spoke in tongues. Nellie was not particularly religious—no one heard her say anything about Jesus—but her family understood the Holy Rollers gave her back something she had lost: if not spiritualism, then the company of other Indians all wailing and singing at once.

  She was a social woman, the life of the party. She liked to laugh at the white rock stars who twisted their hips and shook their butts and sang in funny voices on TV. She spoiled her grandchildren, most of all Irene, but with Lissa, whom Nellie resented for causing her favorite grandchild so much trouble, she was stern. “Leetza,” she called Lissa. Arikara was Nellie’s first language. She could not pronounce the soft i in Lissa’s name, and since the Yellow Birds deferred to Nellie, their matriarch, even Irene started calling her own daughter “Lisa.”

  One June day, Nellie commanded Lissa to bring her a scrap of paper, on which she sketched the leaves of a wild turnip plant and sent Lissa out to dig. Lissa did not want to, but her great-grandmother scared her, so she did what she was told. She had never dug turnips before and at first struggled with a shovel to pierce the clay earth; then a neighbor gave her a pitchfork, which made the digging easier. Lissa filled two coffee cans with turnips. That night, Nellie showed her how to trim the stems and peel the skin, revealing the bright, white flesh, and how to braid the long roots into a rope, which they hung on the kitchen wall.

  After that, Nellie was kinder toward Lissa. As her diabetes worsened, infection spread to her foot and then her leg. One day, after another amputation, a man visited the house. Lissa remembered this man clearly: He was short and wore a jacket and carried a rolled wool blanket. When he handed the blanket to Nellie, she cradled it like a baby and then pressed it to her face and cried.

  Lissa never saw inside the blanket, but her grandfather, Willard, explained it to her afterward. He told her the visitor was Bobby Bear, the hereditary chief of the Arikara people and keeper of a medicine bundle. Then he told her that Nellie would die soon and that Lissa should return to school. He gave her a loan of $2,000. In the fall, Lissa moved to Bismarck where she lived with an uncle and then on her own. In June 1987, before her nineteenth birthday, she earned a GED. She gave birth to Shauna that August and started college in Grand Forks. A year later, her great-grandmother died.

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  NOW IT WAS January 2013, and the oil boom still had not come to White Shield despite rumors that it would. An oil company had leased land on the west edge of the segment, though by the time the company gathered the resources to bid, most of the reservation had been leased. According to seismic reports, White Shield had little oil. The leases there were table scraps—land no other company wanted.

  Irene preferred it this way. She saw how the boom was changing the north and west segments of the reservation, and she was grateful—or, at the very least, hopeful—that White Shield would be spared. Altogether, Irene had lived on Fort Berthold only a few years since she left at age eighteen, but she planned on moving back when she retired from her job as a professor of social work at Minot State University. There, every semester for twenty-two years, she had lectured a new class of students on the less heroic foundations of their country—on Indian boarding schools and genocide—and every year, some of her students could not believe that either ever happened.

  It relieved Irene to go home to the reservation where few people questioned these things. Of course, not everyone agreed with her on everything. For instance, while she hoped the boom would never come to White Shield, many tribal members regarded the drilling rigs across the lake with jealousy. “Jeez, we were born in the wrong stars,” Irene heard them say. “Jeez, those Hidatsas got money over there.”

  In fact, some tribal members who lived in White Shield received royalties for land they owned in Mandaree. Their checks varied in size—some large, $10,000 or more, and some very small—which swelled and shrank with the price of oil and were inversely proportional to the size of one’s family. The larger the family, the greater the fractionation, the less a person earned in royalties. Most Arikara families were like the Yellow Birds in that they received little to no royalties, but there were a few exceptions. There was the man and his aunt who one day appeared at Madeleine’s door with a crate of meat and said, “This is for you.” And there was Candace, Irene’s cousin, who had always been less fortunate, since so many of her relatives had died or gone to prison. To put herself through college, Candace made and sold crafts, but with the boom, her luck had turned. “Irene, did you hear?” she said one day when they saw each other at a wake. Candace was now earning $85,000 a month and already had spent a large portion of the money on cars for her kids.

  Jeez, that would be nice, Irene thought, but to Candace, she said, “Let me tell you this: If anybody deserves that money, you do, because you had to put up with so much over the years, and nobody was there to help you.”

  Candace was also charitable toward her elders, and whenever she saw Madeleine in town, she reached into her wallet for a hundred-dollar bill. “Grandma, is there anything you need?” she would say. Madeleine always assured Candace she did not need anything, but once, when Candace insisted, Madeleine mentioned her grandson was in the hospital and could use a laptop. Candace gave Madeleine a thousand dollars.

  These tales of generosity spread across White Shield: A man shuttled people to AA meetings. An elder gave her money to Saint Anthony Catholic Church. Another woman, before she died, donated to the American Legion, while a man bought a vehicle for the addiction treatment center in Parshall, and his sister hired a bus to carry elders to casinos in South Dakota. Irene’s best friend, Evangeline, bought Pendletons and star quilts to give
to those who could not afford gifts for the pallbearers at their funerals.

  As Irene put it, it was the “way of our people” to help those in need. These were also the ways, she sometimes complained, of people who had more money than they knew what to do with. When her friends posted photographs on Facebook of vacations in Mexico and Hawaii, Irene wondered when their fortunes would run out. Most tribal members appeared to spend their money on harmless things, but some, she knew, spent it on drugs. With all the new money around, drugs were proliferating on the reservation. Irene knew of a man in Minneapolis, an addict who earned $30,000 a month and blew each check in a matter of weeks. Sometimes, he asked her sister Cheryl for a loan. “Can you give me forty dollars until my check comes?” he would say, and Cheryl would wire him the money. He never paid her back.

  The story disturbed Madeleine. “Gee, he could be helping people instead of killing himself or the people he’s with,” she griped to her daughters. “You know it says in the Bible, What good is money if you end up in Hell?”

  Madeleine was not fond of the boom, but her distance from it by living in White Shield had seemed to foster, more than anything, indifference. She was glad some families were getting a break after suffering for so long, and she appreciated her friends’ generosity. Irene, on the other hand, believed her mother was blind to the darker ways the boom was changing their community—to the ways it had changed even their own family.