Yellow Bird Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Portions of this work were originally published in different form in High Country News and in the electronic versions of The Atlantic (theatlantic.com) and The New Yorker (newyorker.com). Photograph on this page by Kalen Goodluck used by permisison of Kalen Goodluck.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Murdoch, Sierra Crane, author.

  Title: Yellow Bird: oil, murder, and a woman’s search for justice in Indian country / by Sierra Crane Murdoch.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022833 (print) | LCCN 2019022834 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399589157 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399589164 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Yellow Bird, Lissa. | Clarke, Kristopher. | Missing persons—Investigation—North Dakota—Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. | Criminal investigation—United States—Citizen participation. | Oil industry workers—North Dakota—Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. | Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. | Fort Berthold Indian Reservation (N.D.)—Social conditions.

  Classification: LCC HV6762.U5 M78 2020 (print) | LCC HV6762.U5 (ebook) |DDC 364.152/3092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022833

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022834

  Ebook ISBN 9780399589164

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover photographs: © Kristin Barker

  v5.4

  ep

  Every day they had to look at the land, from horizon to horizon, and every day the loss was with them; it was the dead unburied, and the mourning of the lost going on forever.

  —LESLIE MARMON SILKO

  Let’s say he knows we need someone

  to admire, and says a hero is a person

  who blunders into an open cave,

  and that it takes courage to blunder.

  —STEPHEN DUNN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map of North Dakota

  Map of Fort Berthold Indian Reservation

  Prologue: Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota

  Part I: Boom

  Chapter 1: The Brightest Yellow Bird

  Chapter 2: Missing

  Chapter 3: Oil Kings

  Chapter 4: The Great Mystery

  Chapter 5: What Good Is Money If You End Up in Hell

  Chapter 6: The Flyer

  Chapter 7: The Church

  Chapter 8: What She Broke

  Chapter 9: Sarah

  Chapter 10: The Search

  Chapter 11: The Gunman

  Chapter 12: Confessions

  Part II: Bust

  Chapter 13: Us Against the World

  Chapter 14: The Badlands

  Chapter 15: Trial

  Chapter 16: The Body

  Chapter 17: Shauna

  Chapter 18: What They Say We Loved

  Author’s Note

  Works Consulted

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota

  A MAN ONCE TOLD ME a story of how he dug up the bones of his relatives and held them in his hands. He is an old man now; then, he was young. He said he took the job because there were no others on the reservation and because the work was easier if a man did not think too hard about whose bones he was handling.

  The reburials began in the summertime, in 1952, after the ground had thawed and the grass hung heavy with wood ticks. There were sixteen men, he said, two of them Native, and a foreman from Louisiana. The foreman did not seem to care, or perhaps he did not notice, when some of the men were careless with the bones and posed with them in various positions. The young man cared but did not say anything. He went on with his work. He placed the fragments in pine boxes, nailed the boxes shut, marked them with the names to which the bones apparently belonged.

  The work lasted two summers, but the young man stayed just one and then enlisted in the Marines. His father, who had died the year before, was among the first laid in the new churchyard on the grasslands that rose from the Missouri River to the east edge of the reservation. The other families had left their villages by this time. In winter, when the river froze, the Army Corps of Engineers lifted houses onto pallets and pulled them over the ice. There would not be time to move all of the houses; nor would there be time to dig every grave. People would tell stories of heading for the bluffs, turning now and then to watch the water rise, though it did not happen quite like this. When the Garrison Dam was finished, the river came up slowly into the creases of the valley’s palm, filling first the ditches and furrowed fields, and then climbing steps and spilling onto floors.

  The churches were among the last structures to be moved, and it is said that the bells rang all the way to their new locations. Sunday services continued for a time, though they were poorly attended after the flood claimed the only roads on the reservation crossing the river, and after the people scattered on higher ground. One day, the young man returned to find his church emptied and the concrete grave markers grown over like stumps. People came now and then to carve their names in the church walls or to lay cigarettes and flowers on the graves of their relatives, but only at funerals did the living outnumber the dead. It would not take long for the prairie to claim the church, for wind to unhook the battens and shatter windows, and for rodents to make homes in the floors and walls. This became the nature of the reservation. A person could come home and find things taken or worn out. It was something you got used to, the inevitability of loss. The lake that rose in the river’s place was a shrine to this loss, to the things that had been and could be lost. Things pried from their foundations. Swept away with wood and bones. Pressed against the dam. Buried in the silt.

  PART I

  Boom

  1

  The Brightest Yellow Bird

  LISSA YELLOW BIRD CANNOT EXPLAIN why she went looking for Kristopher Clarke. The first time I asked her the question, she paused as if I had caught her by surprise, and then she said, “I guess I never really thought about it before.” For someone so insatiably curious about the world, she is remarkably uncurious about herself. She is less interested in why she has done something than in the fact of having done it. Once, she asked me in reply if the answer even mattered. People tended to wonder all kinds of things about her: Why did she have five children with five different men? Why had she become an addict and then a drug dealer when she was capable of anything else?

  Lissa stands five feet and four inches tall, moonfaced and strong-shouldered, a belly protruding over hard, slender legs. Her teeth are white and perfectly straight. Her hair is lush and dark. She has a long nose, full lips, and brows that arch like crescents above her eyes. When I met Lissa, she was forty-six years old and looked about her age—though, given the manner in which she lives, one might expect h
er to look older. She has a habit of going days without sleep, of sleeping upright in chairs. She rarely cooks, subsisting largely on avocados, tuna, croissants, mangoes, and candied nuts, and smokes like a fish takes water into its gills. She often loses things, particularly her lighters. One night, I watched as Lissa searched for one, nearly gutting her kitchen, until she gave up, bent over the countertop, and lit her cigarette with the toaster.

  She is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, an assembly of “Three Affiliated Tribes” who once farmed the bottomlands of the Missouri River and now call a patch of upland prairie in western North Dakota their home. The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation is three times the area of Los Angeles. The tribe has more than sixteen thousand members. Like a majority of these members, Lissa has not lived on Fort Berthold in some time, but she keeps in her possession an official document establishing her tribal citizenship:

  Arikara Blood Quantum: 23/64

  Mandan Blood Quantum: 1/4

  Hidatsa Blood Quantum: 3/16

  Sioux (Standing Rock) Blood Quantum: 1/8

  Total Quantum This Tribe: 51/64

  Total Quantum All Tribes: 59/64

  “What’s the other 5/64ths?” I once asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lissa replied, “but somebody fucked up.”

  It was a joke. As far as she knew, at least two fathers of her children were white, and if anyone had fucked up her blood quantum, Lissa thought, it was the United States government. The fractions were controversial and arbitrary, assigned to her great-grandparents in the 1930s by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to determine how many individuals belonged to the tribe and how much federal assistance the tribe thus deserved. One could be a whole Indian, a fraction of an Indian, or no Indian. The idea was that a person’s Indian-ness could be defined solely by race. It was the Bureau’s way of applying order to the mess it had made, though to Lissa the fractions had always seemed superficial. In reality, she believed, there was no clear order to her life. She had worked as a prison guard, bartender, stripper, sex worker, advocate in tribal court, carpenter, bondsman, laundry attendant, and welder. She studied corrections and law enforcement at the University of North Dakota, where she graduated from the criminal justice program, though rather than working for the police, she spent much of her adult life evading them. She was arrested six times, charged twice for possessing meth “with intent to deliver,” and given two concurrent prison sentences—ten and five years—two years of which she served. When Kristopher Clarke went missing in 2012, Lissa was on parole. Her interest in his disappearance may have seemed misplaced were it not for the fact that it made as much sense as every other random interest she had taken in her lifetime.

  Lissa was born on June 13, 1968, to Irene* Yellow Bird and Leroy Chase, both members of the MHA Nation. Leroy had joined the Air Force and was not present for her birth, nor was he present for the rest of her life except on a rare phone call. Irene’s mother, Madeleine, was Catholic and, since Irene was twenty-one and unmarried, arranged for a relative to take Lissa. The arrangement lasted seven months before Irene, swayed by the new radicalism of the era, decided she would not be shamed into giving up her daughter and asked for Lissa back.

  It was her mother whom Lissa would later blame for the patternlessness of her life—her mother’s ambition, to be exact. After they reunited, Irene dedicated herself to academic pursuits. They left North Dakota for California, where Irene enrolled again in school, then returned to North Dakota, then left for Wisconsin, where Irene pursued another degree before returning, again, to North Dakota, where she served for a while as the only Native American professor in the state. The longest Lissa and her mother remained anywhere was three years, when they lived in Bismarck, a few hours south of the reservation. They moved to the city in 1972, when Lissa was four years old, into an apartment with a single bedroom where Lissa kept a pet fish. One day, the fish died, and Irene flushed it down the toilet. Lissa could not forgive her mother for this. It seemed unfair to her that something living, which she had loved, should end up in the sewer. Her sensitivity exasperated Irene, who supposed her daughter had wanted a full burial, with a procession and drums and star quilts draped over a casket. She supposed her daughter even wanted a priest. Lissa had acquired certain habits in church, such as fashioning bowls out of paper and placing them around the apartment. “Alms for the poor!” she called when anyone came to visit. Sometimes the visitors were her mother’s white, wealthier friends, but often they were family. “Alms for the poor!” she called nonetheless, shaking her bowls piously, until one day her mother had enough and scolded, “Lissa, we are the poor.”

  Lissa had always been like this, Irene later told me—a fanatic with a bleeding heart, giving weight to weightless things. I supposed it was a kind way of explaining her daughter’s passionate tendencies, since Shauna, Lissa’s own daughter, explained them to me differently. “My mom is an addict,” Shauna said. She meant this in the broadest sense.

  Shauna is the oldest of her mother’s five children, only nineteen years younger than Lissa, a generational closeness that pressed her up against her mother’s faults and made her feel them more acutely than her siblings. When Lissa started smoking crack, Shauna was eight years old. Six years later, Lissa turned to meth. But even in the years before she got high, Lissa, Shauna believed, had been prone to obsession.

  Among the first of these obsessions Shauna recalled were plants. When she was in preschool, her mother had discovered an interest in growing things, and after that they kept all kinds of plants—leafy, tropical, sun-starved plants spilling from the windows of their apartment in Grand Forks, where Lissa attended college, as well as trays of vegetable starts Lissa grew from seed, though they never had any space for a garden. After that, her mother’s obsessions came in all forms, sudden and indiscriminate, but each one Lissa had taken on with the faith and focus of a zealot. For a while, it had been music—Lissa taught herself to play piano—before she purchased a camera and became an ardent documentarian.

  If these obsessions sounded like hobbies, Shauna insisted they were not. It had never been enough for her mother to take an interest in something. Rather, Lissa was set on being the best at everything she did. The best drug dealer. The most dogged bondswoman. The eventual leader of each organization she joined. After Lissa emerged from prison sober, she still found plenty of things to obsess about and, in fact, it seemed that sobriety intensified her fixations. According to Shauna, the only difference between the things that occupied her mother when she was sober and the things that made her high was that Lissa often abandoned the sober things with the same swiftness and ease with which they came to her. In one of their many moves, they had left the plants behind. This was one thing Shauna expected as a child, that whatever life they were living at one moment would last only so long. Always they had kept moving, from hotels to shelters, from apartments they rented to the houses of friends, and from the papery walls of all the places they lived, her mother had hatched, again and again, changed and yet the same.

  And so when Lissa first told Shauna about the oil worker who was missing—and how she planned on finding him—Shauna assumed this obsession would also pass. She thought it would last weeks or months until the young man was found. She did not think it would go on for years. “I don’t know what it was about that boy,” Shauna would say, but Kristopher Clarke was different.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS BECAUSE of Clarke that I encountered Lissa. I was a journalist reporting on the mystery of his disappearance, which, by the time I met her in 2014, mostly had been solved. On February 22, 2012, Clarke had gone missing from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. He was twenty-nine years old at the time, white, from Washington State. North Dakota was booming with oil development, and Fort Berthold was in the center of the oil fields. Clarke worked for a trucking company based in a remote southern district of the reservation wh
ere most of the wells were being drilled. He was a “pusher,” in the lingo of the industry: Among other things, he arranged contracts to haul water to drilling sites, where the water was mixed with chemical additives and shot down holes to “frack” the wells. On the morning he went missing, Clarke was spotted at the trucking company offices. Several people who spoke to him said he was leaving that day to visit his grandfather in Oregon, but no one saw Clarke again. In February 2014, after he had been missing two years, I came across some news about a break in his case: There had been arrests and, soon afterward, a confession. The alleged perpetrators were awaiting trial, but while prosecutors believed Clarke had been murdered, they lacked one thing that would prove their case: They could not find his body.

  The story caught my eye because I was familiar with the reservation from which Clarke disappeared. Since 2011, I had been going there myself to report on the oil boom that was transforming the tribal community. One of the ways I had seen the place change was a rise in crime, a new pervasiveness of violence due to an influx of non-Native workers over whom the MHA Nation had no criminal jurisdiction. That was why I took an interest in Clarke: I had some understanding of the legal topography into which he disappeared, and I suspected his case might be a window into the darker realities of the boom.

  On the morning of November 4, 2014, I dropped by the tribal newspaper offices, where the editor, a woman I knew, suggested I interview Lissa, who at that moment happened to be out searching for Clarke’s body. The editor arranged for us to meet that night.