Yellow Bird
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country (Random House, 2021) takes its title from the name of the book’s protagonist, Lissa Yellow Bird, an indigenous woman whose tribal ancestors resided in what is now known as the Fort Berthold reservation of North Dakota. In the opening pages of the book, Lissa is described by members of her family and by the author, journalist Sierra Crane Murdoch, as, alternately: a fanatic with a bleeding heart, luminous, strong shouldered, and an addict.
The opening chapter introduces the reader not only to Lissa’s varied life experiences and complex character, but also to a brief history of her affiliated tribes, to the convoluted policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, both past and present, to the mystery that drives part of the book’s narrative--the disappearance of Kristopher Clarke from Fort Berthold, in 2012--and to the oil boom the brought both Clarke and Murdoch to the reservation, as, respectively, oil field worker and journalist covering the boom.
It's a lot of ground to cover in one chapter and it sets the tone for the book, which is a story that contains multitudes: the intergenerational trauma of Native Communities--their resilience and capacity to survive and heal--capitalism, oil, greed, death, betrayal, redemption, the blurry lines between what we choose and what is chosen for us by corrupt and pervasive powers.
Yellow Bird, which was shorted listed for the Pulitzer Prize, offers a nuanced and complex portrait of Lissa and the Arikara tribe. It’s an emotional read that will challenge your allegiance to any one person or doctrine and will ask you to question the story you develop along the way about who Lissa is, about how personal and collective violence unfold as they do, and about who or what is responsible.
While the mystery of Clarke’s disappearance is interesting and serves to drive the narrative forward in time, it is just one of many narrative threads weaving an existential mystery that invites more questions than it answers. How is it that pain travels through time and across communities? As individuals and within community, how do we bear the unbearable? What drives Lissa’s search for Clarke is never fully settled, and it shouldn’t be because what drives any of us? Every story we tell begets another.
Lissa is a fierce protagonist, at turns volatile and reckless. She shares, “When you look at our culture, one of the things we pride ourselves in is our warriors, the ones who delivered our people. Out of hard times when all the odds were against them” (p.353). Lissa seems to embody the warrior spirit and delivers to the story and to those who love her something bigger than the fulfillment of any one promise.
Perhaps most of all, Yellow Bird is a story about story. What are the narratives that shape and define our experiences, both individual and collective? How do we shape those narratives, for ourselves and for others? Who gets to tell them and what is lost or found in the telling?
Murdoch, a white woman, is herself a character throughout the book, which came together over eight years and thousands of hours of time with Lissa and many others around Fort Berthold. Murdoch writes of her decision to include herself in the story: “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…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” (p. 370).
And isn’t that the thing about any compelling story? The way in which one event or character shapes another in ways both seen and unseen. This is especially true of the trauma narrative, which we might understand as the kind of story that allow us to make sense of our painful experiences and to find a cohesive structure that gives shape to our pains but also honors our resilience, our strength and our capacity to heal.
As Murdoch writes: “This was the paradox of trauma: To heal from it, you had to know where it came from and then, in a sense, disbelieve it. You had to trust you were more than the damage done to you. No matter how much others made you suffer, you had to cease seeing yourself as a victim” (p. 344). Easier written about than experienced but perhaps this is the real mystery at the heart of Yellow Bird: how it is that meeting our deepest personal and collective suffering becomes its antidote.