Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  I rode along with Sanchez a few times in the weeks I spent with the department. He was Latino, from Indiana, engaged to a tribal member with whom he had two kids. He had tattooed forearms and hair cut so short I could see the damp of his scalp. He seemed tired, nervous, the first night I rode with him, flicking a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as I stared quietly out the window. The ditches alongside the road were littered with plastic bags that tossed in the wind and caught on pasture fences, and with bloated carcasses of unlucky deer. “Do you swim in the lake?” I asked Sanchez as we neared the bridge.

  He shook his head. “This lake still has tombs down there,” he said. “You know they didn’t have time to relocate their dead? Swimming in a liquid tomb, no thanks.”

  The reservation felt sleepy that evening, like we were waiting for something to begin. We crossed the lake and turned at the casino. By the shore was a tackle shop, some pavilions, and a campground—a few hundred tents and trailers tucked into the trees. I had been here only a few times since my encounter with the mechanics. The trailers were gone from the casino lot, but along the grassy banks of the lake were more shelters than there had been before. Men cooked dinner on outdoor grills, nodding as we passed. Most of the shelters looked empty, their inhabitants, I assumed, at work.

  As the sun set, we left the campground and drove to New Town. Streetlights cast the buildings in dull yellow. We wound through a neighborhood where the houses all looked the same; and around the Northern Lights building, which was quiet except for a man turning doughnuts in the parking lot. We had heard the squeal of his tires from a distance, but when we arrived, his car was still, and the man—eyes bloodshot, alert—was smoking a cigarette in the passenger seat.

  Sanchez received only one call that night, a domestic dispute at Prairie Winds, a trailer park in New Town located behind the railroad tracks. The tribal police often responded to calls in the park, since some residents there struggled with addiction, but lately there had been more calls than usual. The residents were stressed, Sanchez explained; all of them would soon be evicted. The owner of the park had sold it to a man who planned to build houses for oil workers and employees of a local energy company. Tribal members had protested, marching in the streets with signs that read RELOCATION ENDED IN THE ’70S. In response, the council had invested $2 million in a park east of town. The new site had no water or electricity yet, and residents had only a month before they would have to move.

  We circled New Town until midnight and then lingered outside a bar on the main street. A woman in a silver skirt waited by the door. Sanchez had pointed her out earlier, spotting her by her house. He believed she was a sex worker, and when I asked why he thought this, he explained, “I work eighty-some hours a week, and I sit in front of these bars every night. I know that this night she left with that guy, and last night she left with this guy, and then the night before—” Sanchez hedged. “I know that doesn’t prove anything,” he said, but sometimes, in his patrol car, women admitted they were sex workers. Sanchez had noticed other signs as well: a man who hurried women into a car when police drove near; women captured on the casino security cameras moving in and out of hotel rooms; meth addicts whom investigators suspected of trading sex for drugs in the man camps; girls who arrived at school with new iPods and jewelry. On a reservation where everyone once knew everyone, noticing was easy. “I know these girls,” Sanchez told me. “I know their parents, and I know for a fact that their parents cannot afford to buy them these things.”

  The tragedies these officers tended to often involved their own relatives. “I ask them, ‘Are you using clean needles? Did you get tested for hep C?’ ” one officer, Dawn White, told me as I rode along with her one evening. “There are quite a few who cry in the backseat and tell me all about their addictions. It’s hard. How I rationalize it: If I have to put them in jail to save their life, I’ll do it.” Sometimes, parents begged her to arrest their children. “They’ll say, ‘Arrest them, Dawn, because I don’t want to bury them.’ ”

  It was the middle of July, and we were driving to the powwow in White Shield. White was in her early thirties with radiant skin and slick black hair drawn into a bun. She had been talkative when I met her at the station, but as we drove along the edge of the lake, she quieted. The radio filled our silences. A man was having a stroke; a couple was fighting in a parking lot. The dispatcher had a drowsy voice. The calls were meant for another officer, and I sensed White wasn’t listening.

  “When I come to White Shield, I just feel so happy and calm,” she said. “You look out there, and there’s no blowtorches, no rigs, no trucks.” The road curved west and south again and climbed a hill that sloped toward the lake. At the top of the hill, a church appeared—first a steeple and then a roof, and windows and steps, and a grove of pines sheltering a cemetery. White stopped the car, and for a moment we sat looking at the church. It had been carried up from the bottomlands, she said. Her elders remembered attending services before the flood. Now it was weathered, sky showing through. I considered suggesting we go inside, but White got a call—a reckless driver on the road near the powwow—and we continued south.

  The fields were blooming yellow. Buildings appeared amid some trees, and then came the sound of drums, low and tinny in the distance.

  We did not stay long at the powwow but rode slowly around the outer circle. It was a flash of color, men whirling across a green, glowing turf. White chatted with a cousin, asked a boy to pick up his candy wrapper. Then we left the grounds and turned north.

  We made one more stop that night in White Shield, at a house set nakedly in a field. The family living in the house had a twenty-eight-year-old son who overdosed and died a week earlier while riding around with his cousins. I waited in the car as White approached the house. A woman came onto the porch and embraced White. The sun cast the porch in shadow so that I could not see the woman’s eyes, though I knew that she was crying. Then another woman emerged, nodded to White, and took off in the direction of the sun, on a path cut through high grass. A dog trotted after her. There were many dogs around, and birds on the power lines, and old cars with grass grown up between the wheels, circles mowed around them.

  The door opened once more. This time it was a girl, nineteen, I guessed. She wore a U.S. Navy T-shirt, her shorts baggy, her hair in a ponytail. She had seen me from inside the house and approached with her eyes pointed toward the powwow grounds. “Are these your cousins?” I said, nodding to the parked cars.

  “A bunch of killers,” she said. “He was dying, and they didn’t do nothing. Just kept driving, then took him to the house when he was already blue.”

  The girl cursed quietly, resting her forearms on the window frame, and together we surveyed the porch. The woman was no longer crying but talking in whispers to White, who had a hand on a hip and, with the other, wiped sweat from her brow.

  * * *

  —

  THE ATLANTIC PUBLISHED my article in February 2013 under the title “On Indian Land, Criminals Can Get Away with Almost Anything.” It began with an anecdote about a white teenage girl who followed her father from Texas to the Bakken. He refused to let her stay with him, so she wound up in Prairie Winds, the trailer park, living with a friend. One night at a bar in New Town, she met an oil worker who bought her drinks and took her to his camper. She would remember some men and a woman were having sex, and they raped her. Officer Sanchez found the girl that night, scrambling out of a ditch near a man camp. He wrapped her in a blanket and took her to the tribal police station, where an investigator, Angela Cummings, interviewed her. The girl could not remember the races of her rapists. First she said yes when Cummings asked if they were Native; then she corrected herself, believing they were white and Latino. If the latter was true, neither tribal nor federal officials had jurisdiction in the case. Cummings called a county deputy, who took the girl off the reservation.

  Days after the s
tory ran, I got a call from Steve Kelly, the former tribal lawyer and the owner of Trustland Oilfield Services. We had never spoken before, but he had found my number because he was troubled by a paragraph in the Atlantic piece in which I noted that the man camp where the teenager had been raped was located behind the Trustland offices. He had no connection to the man camp, he said, and hoped I would clarify this in the online story. He worried my mention of Trustland had been “something political.” I assured him it was nothing political, though I was curious what politics he was referring to. “I can’t compete with the chairman,” he said, explaining that Tex Hall’s outfit, Maheshu Energy, was “fronting” for a white-owned company. Kelly knew quite a bit about the politics of the reservation and was glad to help with my next story, he said. I thanked him, promised to make the clarification, and then hung up the phone.

  In the months after I reported for the article, crime on the reservation escalated. A man who had come to Fort Berthold for the boom stabbed a tribal member to death; the victim was Officer Sage’s younger brother. Then Kalcie Eagle, the son of a councilman, broke into a house in New Town and shot a white woman and her three grandchildren. Mike Marchus, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent in Minot, photographed the crime scene and later would tell me it was the most difficult case he ever worked. Eagle killed the grandmother first; and then two boys, thirteen and six; and a girl, ten, who was in the bathtub. Sanchez and another officer tracked Eagle to Parshall, where Eagle brandished a knife and slit his own throat.

  When I heard the news, I remembered Eagle from the summer. I had been with Officer Sage at a Marathon Oil facility—an alarm gone haywire—when a call came and we sped through open pasture, yellow with rapeseed, to New Town. Sage had walked slowly toward the house. The councilman answered the door. It was the councilman who had called the police; he had been calling often, lately. Eagle was addicted to meth and could be violent when he was high, but that evening he was docile and let Sage escort him outside. This was all I saw of Eagle, pale and sweating as he passed through our headlights. I remember he squeezed his eyes shut before vanishing into the dark of another police car.

  In the months following the murders, the tribal community struggled to make sense of them. Tex Hall, in the Washington Post, called Eagle’s crime the “worst tragedy” on the reservation in his memory. The horror was made larger by how well people had known both Eagle and the victims. A woman I contacted when I heard the news had seen the grandmother just days before she died. People were more reluctant to speak of Eagle, perhaps out of respect for his parents. His father drowned in the lake soon afterward, and fewer spoke about that. Those who did speak seemed to fall on one of two sides: Either Eagle had always been troubled, enabled by his own family, perhaps even destined for violence; or drugs had changed him in awful, unnatural ways. In this second telling, the boom was a coconspirator, having made meth, as Sanchez put it, “as easy to find as a gallon of milk.”

  In November 2012, the same month Eagle murdered the family, the tribe earned almost $10 million in oil royalties and production taxes. By the end of the next year, this figure would double as the tribe’s total earnings since the beginning of the boom approached a billion dollars. The tribe did not make its expenditures public, but some of my sources grumbled that little of this money had yet been spent on social services or public safety. Millions of dollars would go toward expanding the casino, while the domestic violence unit would continue to be housed in a single-wide trailer across the street.

  Still, the murders had an effect. In December 2012, the tribe asked federal authorities to determine where Eagle’s meth had come from, which led them to Michael Smith, a white man from Colorado living on the reservation. One morning that winter, the New Town police attempted to arrest Smith, who barricaded himself inside a house and for twenty-four hours would not come out. The house belonged to a tribal member trapped inside. She was addicted to heroin—Smith, her dealer. When night passed and neither emerged, police hired a front-end loader to tear a wall off the house. The woman and Smith were arrested, and it was decided that day by the tribal council that the drug situation had gotten out of hand. Hall called an emergency meeting and recruited tribal members to serve on a drug task force.

  On March 27, 2013, Timothy Purdon, the North Dakota U.S. attorney, charged Smith and twenty-one others, including twelve members of the tribe, with conspiracy to distribute meth and heroin. Investigators had traced the drugs sold on Fort Berthold to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Southern California, where two brothers were the conduits between Mexico and North Dakota. The next year, Purdon would indict sixty others for trafficking drugs on the reservation.

  Tribal officers and social workers told me they were grateful for the federal help, but if the arrests made a difference, it hardly showed. At the end of 2013, the task force would assemble data from tribal departments into a report: Three years earlier, 30 percent of the crimes committed on the reservation had been drug-related; now, the number was 60 percent. Three years earlier, 69 percent of domestic violence cases had been drug-related; now, the number was 100 percent. Since 2010, all cases filed with the tribe’s Children and Family Services had been drug-related, and the number of cases had tripled over three years. Ninety percent of the health center budget was being spent on drug-related cases. Hepatitis C had spread among tribal members, with 10 percent of health center clients testing positive, a quarter of them pregnant. Children as young as eight years old had been admitted to the juvenile justice center showing signs of heroin and meth use. Meanwhile, rates of domestic and sexual assault were rising, according to Sadie Young Bird, the director of the domestic violence unit. The unit would counsel more victims in 2013 than in any year prior. Ninety-six percent of these cases would involve alcohol and drugs.

  “When the boom’s over, what’s it going to be like here?” Young Bird had asked me. She guessed: “They’re not going to take their trailers with them. It’ll just be deserted, with a lot of broken people.”

  8

  What She Broke

  AMONG THE TRIBAL MEMBERS TEX Hall appointed to the drug task force was Irene Yellow Bird, on account of her expertise in addiction treatment. Irene did not mention this to Lissa, who found out one day in March 2013, when she visited her mother in Minot. Irene lived in a small, carpeted house with a bedroom, a living room, and an eat-in kitchen. She had lived alone for some time now. In the years before Wayne’s death, they had divorced, and then he had moved back in, and then they had split up again. He was “running around with a Puerto Rican girl,” as Irene put it, and living with the woman when he died. Irene had received the news of his death while at a doctor’s appointment for an oncological exam, and when her doctor tried to leave the room, the door had stuck. “Your dad was visiting,” she later texted her stepson. “He wouldn’t let me and the doctor out of that room. I suppose he’s being jealous again.”

  Her living room was furnished with a love seat, a television, a recliner where she often slept, and an expansive library containing books on all aspects of social work—chemical dependency, diabetes, family violence, child welfare—as well as on grant writing, Indigenous spirituality, and pedagogical theory. Beside two volumes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders were books by Vine Deloria, Jr., a Lakota writer and historian, and Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. There were cookbooks, self-help manuals, and a biography of Mother Teresa, and memoirs by famous American Indian Movement activists like Dennis Banks, Leonard Peltier, Mary Brave Bird, and Russell Means. Irene knew Russell when she lived in Bismarck. She admired his stern demeanor, his gift for oration. That was in 1973, as the occupation of Wounded Knee was ending. Irene attended some protests, including a Bismarck event hosted by the John Birch Society, at which Doug Durham, an FBI informant who infiltrated the occupation by posing as an activist, was invited to speak. Lots of Indians attended his talk, including Russell’s cous
in, Dennis, who sat right up front and glared at Durham. When it came time for questions, Irene asked Durham what impact his work had on his family, and she swore she saw regret flicker across his face.

  The books of which she was most proud were her collections of Arikara stories, recorded and translated by Douglas Parks, a white anthropological linguist. In 1974, Irene attended a workshop hosted by the Inner Peace movement, where she met the director of the language program at Mary College in Bismarck, whom Irene told about her brother Chucky and his efforts to preserve the Arikara language. The director offered to reach out to Parks, who was studying Pawnee, a language in the same family as Arikara. Not long after that, Parks visited Fort Berthold, where Irene introduced him to Chucky and various elders, among them Nellie Yellow Bird. Over the following years, Parks became the preeminent scholar of the Arikara language, and Irene’s brother Loren studied under him. Now Loren was a cultural expert for the National Park Service and had been hired by a Hollywood director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, to teach Arikara to Leonardo DiCaprio for his role in The Revenant.

  On the walls not taken up by books were portraits of Irene’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as a photograph of Lissa in her final year of high school. It was remarkable that Irene still had the photograph—that Lissa hadn’t stolen it with the rest. Her shoulders were draped in black, her left hand rested on her right arm. Her skin was smooth, her eyebrows arched, her cheeks dimpled in the corners of her mouth. Her eyes laughed out of the dark.