Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  The danger of writing a book about someone with a cultural and political background that most people know nothing about is that a reader might begin to think they understand everything about that kind of person because they read the book. The book fills a void that should have been filled by public school curriculum. A reader who has never met a Native American might believe that every woman of that identity is like Lissa, when in reality, Lissa, whose experiences indeed are common, is the most iconoclastic person I know.

  The question of who has the right to tell whose story became a subject of impassioned conversation among writers and other artists around the time that I was working on this book. In 2017, in an address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Joyce Carol Oates argued for “more, not less trespassing.” “Perhaps it’s a worthier challenge to tell the stories of others,” she said, “with as much care as if they were our own.” Artists, she added, should not “be surprised when they do provoke hostile reactions. This is the price we pay for our commitment to bearing witness in a turbulent America.” Meanwhile, in his column for the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole challenged the argument that “we have a responsibility to tell one another’s stories and must be free to do so.” This thinking is “seductive but flawed,” he wrote. “The responsibility toward other people’s stories is real and inescapable, but that doesn’t mean that appropriation is the way to satisfy that responsibility….It is not about taking something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you but rather about recognizing that history is brutal and unfinished and finding some way, within that recognition, to serve the dispossessed.”

  While I admit these discussions gave me considerable anxiety, I am grateful for them in that they led me to have honest conversations with Lissa and her relatives about my role in their lives and in the story I had chosen to tell. From these conversations, I made two decisions. First, I involved Lissa in my process to a degree that some journalists would consider a liability but in my case proved essential. After I wrote several drafts, I brought the book to Lissa, and we read it together from beginning to end. Although we had talked about how I was approaching the story, I believe this was the first time Lissa fully understood my intentions. Not only did she correct my errors, but she helped me see the book’s weaknesses and encouraged me to not withhold difficult material but go deeper. I repeated this process with Shauna, Irene, and Madeleine, reading parts aloud to them, and in this way, they all helped me get closer to the truth.

  The second decision I made was to put myself in the book. I did this for several reasons. I wanted to be clear who was telling this story—who heard it, interpreted it, chose which details to leave in or out—and convey to readers my limitations as a narrator. Writing from the first person also allowed me to let people talk instead of constantly having to paraphrase their thoughts or fit their quotes into a particular scene. But perhaps most important, it felt honest. Not long after I met Lissa, it occurred to me that she conscripts the people around her into her story, that I could not separate myself from her, and that in the years we would spend together, she would influence my life and I, hers. I wrote Yellow Bird at the collision point of two communities—one Native, the other not. As a white writer drawn into the fray, I was a part of that story. “The real fantasy,” Zadie Smith has written, “is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them….There is no getting out of our intertwined history.”

  I wrote that “I don’t know why Lissa trusted me, and I don’t think she knows either.” We remember differently how this project began. I remember sitting in her kitchen, my second time visiting Fargo, and asking how she would feel if I made the story about her. She did not answer me then. She remembers walking in the badlands some weeks later when I asked if I could write the book. I was chasing behind her, trying to keep up. She turned and said, “I’ll think about it.”

  What we both remember is how this trust grew over a long period of time. In some ways, our relationship was traditionally journalistic. We signed no contracts, exchanged no money in the course of my reporting besides the gas and meals I bought now and then and the bit of cash I once sent her when she was broke. In the thousands of hours we spent together and the hundreds more on the phone, I either held my notebook or kept my recorder running. But in all this time, it also was inevitable that we drew close—not just as friends, but as something more intimate and specific: a woman who decided to tell another woman everything about herself.

  Being white was not my only limitation as I wrote this book. I am a daughter but not yet a mother. I am a woman, but I have not lived as long as Lissa has, nor have I survived as much as she has survived. There were many things I did not understand when I began, but that is the job of a journalist—to ask about what you don’t yet know, and then to listen. So I listened to Lissa, to her children, to her mother, grandmother, and uncles, and to everyone else whose stories make up this book. Do I understand their lives in all their complexity? I doubt it. But I understand more than I did eight years ago, and I have done my best to render this story in a way that I hope feels true and meaningful to the people who shared it with me.

  May 21, 2019

  Works Consulted

  BOOKS

  Briody, Blaire. The New Wild West: Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota Boomtown.

  Cash, Joseph, and Gerald Wolff. The Three Affiliated Tribes, Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa.

  Deloria, Jr., Vine. Custer Died For Your Sins.

  Deloria, Jr., Vine, and David E. Wilkins. Tribes, Treaties, & Constitutional Tribulations.

  Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon.

  Lawson, Michael. Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux.

  Meyer, Roy. The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri.

  Parks, Douglas. Myths and Traditions of the Arikara Indians.

  St. Jean, Wendy. Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory, 1830s–1907.

  VanDevelder, Paul. Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation.

  Waziyatawin and Michael Yellow Bird. For Indigenous Minds Only: A Decolonization Handbook.

  Wilkins, David E. Documents of Native American Political Development: 1933 to Present.

  Yarbrough, Fay. Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century.

  ARTICLES, PAPERS, PRESENTATIONS, & THESES

  Ahtone, Tristan. “Aiming for a Higher Ground: The American Indian Movement Hopes to Rise Again, but a New Leader Needs to Shake Gang Ties.” Aljazeera America, January 21, 2015.

  Birger, Jon. “EOG’s big gamble on shale oil.” Fortune Magazine, July 29, 2011.

  Gilmore, Melvin R. Selected papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

  Hill, Kip. “South Hill shooting took place in kitchen.” Spokesman-Review, December 18, 2013.

  ——. “Man arrested in South Hill homicide of Douglas Carlile.” Spokesman-Review, January 14, 2014.

  ——. “Ruling on false testimony from Henrikson witness won’t be admitted, judge rules.” Spokesman-Review, February 19, 2016.

  Holdman, Jessica. “Former tribal chairman joins marijuana company.” Bismarck Tribune, May 29, 2015.

  Horwitz, Sari. “Dark side of the boom.” Washington Post, September 28, 2014.

  Johnson, Michael S. “Story of the Discovery of Parshall Field, North Dakota.” Houston Geological Society Bulletin 54:5 (2012): 19–27.

  Krakoff, Sarah. “Mark the Plumber v. Tribal Empire, or Non-Indian Anxiety v. Tribal Sovereignty?: The Story of Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe,” in Indian Law Stories, ed. Carole Goldberg and Philip Frickey. New York: Thomson Reuters/Foundation Press, 2011.

  Parker, Angela. “Taken Lands: Territory and Sovereignty on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, 1934�
�1960.” 2011, The University of Michigan, PhD dissertation.

  Thompson, Jonathan. “The Ute Paradox: A small Colorado tribe takes control of its energy resources and becomes a billion-dollar corporation—but has it gone too far?” High Country News, July 12, 2010.

  Yellow Bird, Loren. “ ‘Health Care’: Spiritual and Scientific.” Shamanism 14:1 (2001): 25–27.

  Yellow Bird, Loren. “Now I Will Speak (Nawah Ti Waako’): A Sahnish Perspective on What the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Others Missed.” Wicazo Sa Review, University of Minnesota Press 19:1 (2004): 73–84.

  Yellow Bird, Michael. “Neurodecolonization: Applying Mindfulness Research to Decolonizing Social Work,” in Decolonizing Social Work, ed. Mel Gray, John Coates, Michael Yellow Bird, and Tiani Hetherington. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.

  Yellow Bird, Michael. “Decolonizing the Mind: Healing Through Neurodecolonization and Mindfulness,” Portland State University, Indigenous Nations Studies and School of Social Work, in Portland, Oregon. January 24, 2014.

  FILM & MULTIMEDIA

  Melby, Todd. “Oil to Die For,” in Black Gold Boom: How Oil Changed North Dakota.

  Peinado, J. Carlos. Waterbuster.

  Shannon, Jen, and Lex White-Mobley. My Cry Gets Up to My Throat: Reflections on Reverend Case, the Garrison Dam, and the Oil Boom of North Dakota.

  For my family

  Acknowledgments

  I am extraordinarily lucky to have found an editor as clear-eyed, patient, and passionate about this book as Annie Chagnot. I am equally lucky to have been found by Kent Wolf, who understood my hopes immediately, and who has the miraculous ability to dissolve all my worries with his humor. I am grateful, as well, to Chris Jackson, Julie Grau, and Cindy Spiegel, for believing in this project from the beginning, and to Andy Ward, for shepherding it through at the end. Lucy Carson, Molly Friedrich, and Will Watkins also gave their invaluable support.

  Jonathan Thompson offered me the seed of an idea nine years ago. Sarah Gilman trusted me with my first feature, lent me her editing scalpel and then her friendship, and never appeared to tire of hearing about this story. Paul Reyes assigned and edited the essay that made this book possible. Cally Carswell, Kate Julian, Jennie Rothenberg-Gritz, and Anthony Lydgate kindly assigned the stories through which I gained much of my material for this book.

  I am thankful to Bill McKibben, for believing in me now for fifteen years and for making so much possible; to Chris Shaw, for believing in me for almost as long and for answering my every email with compassionate reassurance and advice; to John Elder, for his thoughtful interest and generous engagement with the book when I needed it most; to Ted Conover, for inspiring me with his brave, humble approach to reporting and for his support; and to Rob Cohen, for his honest critique back when I really had no idea what I was doing, and later for his encouragement.

  Tristan Ahtone carefully read the manuscript, offering his critical guidance at a critical time.

  This book would not have been possible without the support of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, which funded the majority of my reporting, and, in particular, Tim McGirk, Lowell Bergman, and Janice Hui. I am also grateful to the MacDowell Colony, which endowed me with writing space and dear friends, as well as a Calderwood grant and a Sylvia Canfield Winn Fellowship.

  Parker Yesko provided me with crucial research assistance in the early stages of this project. I would be remiss to not acknowledge Mardee Ellis and Michael Snell, the most helpful public records specialists I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and Larry Griffin, who quit journalism years ago but went digging through his hard drive to unearth for me an essential document.

  Thank you, Angela Evancie and Kevin Redmon, my “writers without editors,” for your intellectual companionship, and for helping me find the right words. And Lauren Markham, our conversations and your keen advice gave this book form. I am lucky to have you as a model, a collaborator, and a friend.

  I am indebted to my armada of readers, many of whom I’ve already mentioned, and also among them Olivette Orme, Meg McClellan, Zoe Sheldon, Brendan Borrell, and Emily Guerin. Chuck Hudson’s insights during my reporting and writing proved essential. Marilyn Hudson, one of the first people I met on the reservation, generously gave me a place to stay, which became my home away from home. Kandi Mossett offered me advice in the very beginning. Cheryl Abe made me feel especially welcome. Susan Poisson-Dollar and Beth Baugh made sure I had a place to work, while the Orme family provided countless meals and a comfortable bed after my long days mired in public records. Cody Upton and Francesca Coppola hosted me and inspired me when I came to New York.

  I feel a tremendous amount of love for all my friends and relatives who shared in my excitement, bore with me all these years, and gave shape to my own life. Thank you, Corinne, for your steady adventurousness; Maureen, for being my other mom; the Sylvesters, for supporting me in so many ways and celebrating each tiny bit of progress. Mom and Dad, your bottomless love and confidence in me is what brought me here and keeps me going. Win, you may be my little brother, but I learn so much from you. And Terray, thank you for being my patient companion all along, for guiding me, distracting me, and loving me.

  I am grateful to the woman who introduced me to Lissa, and to the hundreds of others who spoke with me over the years, many of whom I don’t mention. Among them are Loren Whitehorn, RJ Smith, and Dwight Sage; each died not long after I met them, but their honesty, gentleness, and conviction influenced me greatly. I am grateful, also, to Elise Packineau, whose prayer helps close this book.

  Most of all, I am thankful to Lissa and her family, the Yellow Birds, for their trust, eloquence, humor, and radical generosity. Nothing has prepared me better for this world than the time I have spent in their wise and loving company.

  About the Author

  SIERRA CRANE MURDOCH, a journalist based in the American West, has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, and High Country News. She has held fellowships from Middlebury College and from the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a MacDowell Fellow.

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