Yellow Bird

Lissa Yellow Bird came out of prison in 2009 to find the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota transformed by the Bakken oil boom. The landscape had changed beyond recognition, the tribal government had come under corporate influence, and her community was dealing with rising violence and addiction.

Three years later she heard that Kristopher "KC" Clarke, a young white oil worker, had vanished from his worksite on the reservation. No one knew where he had gone, and apart from his mother, no one was actively looking. Lissa took a particular interest in the case and began hunting obsessively for clues. The book follows her investigation, which reads like a gritty mystery.

Her search takes her between two worlds: her own tribe, altered by sudden wealth, and the non-Native oil workers who came looking for jobs after the recession. For Lissa the pursuit becomes a form of redemption, an atonement for her own crimes and a reckoning with generations of trauma.

Sierra Crane Murdoch's account is a reported story of a search for justice and a portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, and compassionate, and who can also be manipulative when it helps her cause. It also looks closely at the legacy of systematic violence against a tribal nation, and at the healing that follows.