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) and The New Yorker (newyorker). 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]
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.
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
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