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A review by twowheelsaway
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch
5.0
Wow, this book took me a while to get through, on and off. I initially heard about it on an episode of This American Life , well worth a listen itself.
The book is something entirely different, though. It's a window onto the Fort Berthold reservation, where the things the US did (and continues to do) to indigenous people echo in the people and the land. It's a look at the effects of nearly unfettered capitalism- some good, mostly bad. It's a well-written true crime story.
Mostly, though, it's a portrait of Lissa Yellow Bird, a woman Crane describes as the most iconoclastic person she knows. It flips between Lissa's past and the hunt she's on for a missing oil worker, KC Clarke. Anyone just looking for a true crime story might be disappointed by how much time the book spends away from the hunt, but ultimately Lissa's story is the more interesting part anyways. What possesses her to spend months of her life, taking time off of work, to hunt unpaid for someone she never met? I can say for sure that I would do no such thing, or honestly that it wouldn't occur to me.
Sometimes reading an adventure novel I get caught up thinking, "I don't get it. Why the hell has this character left behind everything they loved to do this thing that seems futile and so much bigger than them?" I wondered this in Yellow Bird as well, but I can't deny that Lissa actually did it. So, now, I find myself actually considering the question-- and Yellow Bird lays out enough of Lissa's imperfect life that I might begin to have some kind of idea.
The book is something entirely different, though. It's a window onto the Fort Berthold reservation, where the things the US did (and continues to do) to indigenous people echo in the people and the land. It's a look at the effects of nearly unfettered capitalism- some good, mostly bad. It's a well-written true crime story.
Mostly, though, it's a portrait of Lissa Yellow Bird, a woman Crane describes as the most iconoclastic person she knows. It flips between Lissa's past and the hunt she's on for a missing oil worker, KC Clarke. Anyone just looking for a true crime story might be disappointed by how much time the book spends away from the hunt, but ultimately Lissa's story is the more interesting part anyways. What possesses her to spend months of her life, taking time off of work, to hunt unpaid for someone she never met? I can say for sure that I would do no such thing, or honestly that it wouldn't occur to me.
Sometimes reading an adventure novel I get caught up thinking, "I don't get it. Why the hell has this character left behind everything they loved to do this thing that seems futile and so much bigger than them?" I wondered this in Yellow Bird as well, but I can't deny that Lissa actually did it. So, now, I find myself actually considering the question-- and Yellow Bird lays out enough of Lissa's imperfect life that I might begin to have some kind of idea.