In 2017 and 2018, Lissa worked on dozens of cases of Native American men and women who had gone missing. There was Alex Vasquez, a twenty-four-year-old Lakota man who disappeared from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in October 2015 and whose rumored murder was still unsolved. And there was Jason Azure, from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana, who, in April 2018, leapt into the Missouri River to save a boy from drowning and drowned himself. Lissa found Jason with a sonar system she had attached to her boat, and with his family’s blessing, tried to fish him out with a giant treble hook, but his body would not catch. Authorities offered little to no help, and when winter came, Jason remained in the river.
Lissa coordinated searches with law enforcement when officials were willing, but in most cases, families came to her because officials had so far done nothing. Among these cases was that of Damon Boyd, an Ojibwe man from Leech Lake, Minnesota, twenty-nine when he disappeared. Damon had been homeless when he last was spotted in Grand Forks in April 2014, which made him difficult to track, but Lissa suspected his medical records might contain some clues. This presented another obstacle: Only a legal guardian could see the records, but Damon’s mother and father were dead. His grandfather, Louis, was sickly. Still, Lissa found a loophole: The Leech Lake Tribe, with Louis’s approval, exercised its sovereignty to appoint Lissa as Damon’s guardian. “Don’t wait for law enforcement,” Lissa took to advising families. When a person went missing, she warned, authorities did three things: “Wait for the person to walk through the door, wait for the person to end up in jail, or wait for their body to surface.”
While Lissa searched for Damon, another case came to her attention. On August 19, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old woman by the name of Savanna Greywind disappeared from her apartment in Fargo. A spokesman for the family contacted Lissa, who visited them at the apartment the next day. No one had seen Savanna, who was eight months pregnant, leave the building; she had left her phone behind. As Lissa visited with the family, police officers searched an apartment upstairs, where a white woman and her white boyfriend lived, but found nothing. Five days later, at the family’s insistence, officers searched upstairs again and discovered Savanna’s baby, alive. Meanwhile, Lissa helped organize search parties. Eight days after Savanna disappeared, volunteer searchers found her body wrapped in plastic, caught in a tree near the bank of the Red River.
It was the first case of a murdered Native American woman to make the national news, due in part to the horror of the story: The white woman who lived upstairs had cut the baby out of Savanna. People magazine published an article. Gloria Allred, the celebrity lawyer representing women who had been sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby, provided legal counsel to the Greywind family. Lissa was invited to speak at conferences all over the country about the high rates at which Indigenous women, men, and children went missing and how often their cases went unsolved. In the fall of 2017, she quit her welding job after her boss said he could no longer allow her absences. By then, another woman had disappeared—Olivia Lone Bear, a thirty-two-year-old member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.
Olivia had last been seen in late October, driving west from a bar in New Town to her home on Sanish Bay. Some suspected she made it home, since her cell phone, wallet, and the jacket she had been wearing were found inside her house. But the truck she drove—a Chevy Silverado borrowed from a friend, an oil worker—was missing. For months after Olivia disappeared, her family and teams of volunteers hunted for the truck. Lissa helped in the beginning but, after an argument with some members of Olivia’s family, moved on to other cases.
Still, the disappearance tormented Lissa. “You know the feeling I had with KC?” she told me one night on the phone. “It’s the same thing with Olivia.” The woman’s family had been searching for her all over the country, but Lissa suspected Olivia’s body was not far from her house, submerged in Sanish Bay. In July 2018, after she spoke at a forum on Fort Berthold, Lissa launched her boat from a marina near the bay and, with a friend and young relative, motored out into the lake. They had been drifting hardly ten minutes when her relative spotted an odd shape with Lissa’s sonar. Lissa took a photograph of the sonar image and texted it to Darrik Trudell, a local deputy, tribal chairman Mark Fox, and me.
I called Lissa. “What is it?” I said. She sighed at my cluelessness.
Four nights later, she called me from Crow Flies High Butte, overlooking the lake, as authorities towed a pickup truck from the water. Olivia’s body was inside.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“Go see my mom and grandma,” Lissa said. “I think they miss me.” The wind crackled from her phone. After we hung up, she forwarded me the text messages she exchanged with Trudell. How had she known where to find the truck, he had wondered. It was something “spiritual,” she wrote. “You probably don’t understand.”
“10-4,” Trudell replied. Understood.
* * *
—
FOR THE FIRST time since Lissa’s parole, her kids moved out of the apartment. Micah went to Minneapolis, where he enrolled in college, while Obie and Caitlin got pregnant, and they rented an apartment of their own. When Lissa was not working on a case, she visited Shauna and spent more time with her grandchildren, who often came to stay with her in Fargo. After Obie’s son was born, OJ, who wanted to meet his grandson, stayed two weeks in Lissa’s spare bedroom. She mentioned the visit to me only after OJ had left. I told her I thought it was the craziest thing she had done in the years that I had known her, but she promised their time together had been cordial and platonic. She had put OJ to work attaching flyers for a missing woman to lampposts around Fargo.
One spring, I spent a month in Fargo. Lissa had resurrected her interest in plants, and when I arrived, there were seed trays scattered around the apartment, stalks sprouting in ceramic pots. We spent most of the month on her patio. A family of rabbits lived by a fence separating the apartment building from another, and each morning as we drank our coffee, we watched them graze in the yard.
Tex Hall had appeared in the news again. According to an article in The Bismarck Tribune, he had partnered with a marijuana grower to bring the industry to reservations. He believed tribes, with all the land they owned, had an opportunity to corner the market. Lissa was not opposed to medical marijuana, but she was not keen on any attempt by Tex to resurrect himself. She was bothered that he had never been held legally accountable for the corruption alleged in the investigative report. Soon, Sarah Creveling would plead guilty to “conspiracy to commit mail fraud.” According to her indictment, she, with James’s help, had “diverted or embezzled approximately $1,720,835.11” from investors. Meanwhile, George Dennis would be charged for concealing the fact that he had aided in the “disposal of the victim’s body,” and his charges would be dismissed after he completed eighteen months of supervised probation. Neither he nor Sarah would serve prison time. And what had Tex suffered? Lissa wondered. In one sense, she resented him more than she did James: James killed two people, but Tex, in welcoming the oil industry, had threatened the lives of thousands. “I’m not trying to minimize James’s deeds,” she told me, “but when you talk about Tex’s crime, you’re talking about what he did to his own people. When you look at our culture, one of the things we pride ourselves in is our warriors, the ones who delivered our people out of hard times when all the odds were against them. Tex had a choice, and what did he bring? Pain. Conflict. Hatred amongst his own people.”
Lissa believed Tex had traded the suffering of his community for the enrichment of a few. His crime was greed, but also denial, and in this way, she said, he was not all that unlike Sarah Creveling: “Even she was blinded by greed. She didn’t want to believe her husband was a murderer. She wanted to believe this false story, this storybook. But that’s not storybook—not when somebody’s missing, presumably murdered. She was not even willing to consider the fact that her husband was involve
d. Let’s not be stupid. She had to question some of this. She didn’t want to believe it. If she had been forced to believe something like that, which she eventually was, then her little fairy tale would go away.”
I understood that it was easy to blame the story on James. Was it really just greed, many people asked me, that had driven him to hire the murders? Was he really that cold-blooded? There was something unknowable about him. I, too, had searched for other explanations. I had wondered if the trial might reveal some trauma he suffered in his past, some other reason why he hurt people, but I had learned nothing more about him, and with no story, I had been left thinking that James was fundamentally lacking in empathy—that he was a sociopath. But what made him a sociopath, I still wondered. He had placed material profit and human life on the same scale. Was that a definition of a sociopath? If the oil industry were a man, would we call him a sociopath? If our governments, which systematically took Indigenous lives, were men, would we call them sociopaths? Was a sociopath just the man himself or also the society that enabled him?
What Lissa had seen in this story, which many had not, was the complicity of a whole community that had willfully believed in the promise of the boom, in the saving power of wealth. The violence was all around them. They just chose not to look. Everyone was both victim and perpetrator, Lissa thought, and their crime was their unwillingness to see this. The injustice of the boom was not the money they lost, nor the opportunity they missed, but the forgetting that made space for the story they had told themselves: “They say, ‘We’re tired of being poor.’ This is how they justify losing what they say we loved.”
* * *
—
A FEW TIMES that spring I visited Ed Hall at his house in Parshall, in his office on a lower floor where he kept portraits of his late wife and art he had collected in the years he lived in Albuquerque. Ed had three desks stacked with reports and newspaper clippings. He was at work on a new report. It would take him a year, he told me, and it would be his last. The topic was “intergenerational trauma,” a term he had heard before but that he had never given much thought.
In the 1980s, a Lakota sociologist, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, had developed a theory of “historical unresolved grief.” She believed that the depression, suicide, addiction, and child and domestic abuse in Native American communities could be traced to periods of trauma: first to genocide, to disease and alcoholism upon contact with white immigrants; then to subjugation by the government, when Indigenous people were confined to reservations and forced into dependency on their oppressors; then boarding schools, which broke apart families, and where children were beaten for speaking their language and in many cases raped; and, at last, relocation, when people left their reservations for cities, where they were treated as second-class citizens, and some abandoned their culture altogether.
In the years since Brave Heart published her theory, many sociologists, as well as geneticists, had supported similar hypotheses through other methods. In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente published an Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which found that people who experienced more stress as children were at higher risk of developing depression, diabetes, and addiction, and of experiencing intimate partner violence and suicide. Scientists were beginning to understand why this might be. In the burgeoning field of epigenetics, studies had shown that trauma and stress cause the body to produce hormones that alter the way our genes are expressed, turning these genes on or off, and that changes to our DNA might be passed from generation to generation.
“I never paid much attention before,” Ed told me. “But I can kind of see it. Why do we take advantage of our own people for money? We have a word for that in Hidatsa: ‘Gírashaaci.’ You’re pitiful. You’re poor. Before we had dollar bills, gírashaaci meant you’re poor because you’ve lost your culture. How did that historical trauma make us forget our cultural values?”
Many people on the reservation told me they considered the oil boom another layer in their tribe’s traumatic history. Years from now, they said, their children would talk about the boom just as their elders talked about the flood.
“It created pain, but it reactivated a lot of it, too,” Nathan Sanchez, the tribal officer, said when I visited him another day that spring. He had quit the police force not long after I rode along with him. One call he responded to haunted him in particular: A family of tribal members he knew collided with an oil truck, and all of them died. After the accident, Sanchez had not been able to touch his own son; when he looked at the boy, he saw the face of a dead child. “I started having these anxiety attacks, these weird dreams and thoughts,” he told me. He quit and took a job dispatching trucks for Tesha Fredericks, the same woman for whom KC intended to work when he left Blackstone. Fredericks often pleaded with Sanchez for information regarding KC, but he had none. “It was a relief to get away from being a cop for a while,” he told me. “But I still knew. I drive these highways, and I remember that accident or that house where someone was murdered or raped. It always comes back. I guess for a guy driving to work, that’s just a fence post, but to me, that’s where so-and-so died. People don’t realize how much death and suffering this oil brought.”
Now Sanchez worked at the juvenile detention center in New Town. He was happier in this job. He played basketball with the kids every day, and they had planted a garden behind the jail. “One kid’s growing tomatoes. We have potatoes, carrots, melons. This place has given me an opportunity to reach out to these youngsters in a way that I never could when I was a cop. Being a police officer is depressing, because you’re always too late. Here, after the time I spend with these kids, most of them straighten up.”
It was a warm day. I had told Madeleine I would visit, so I left Sanchez and drove to White Shield, stopping on my way at the Arikara Cultural Center. The building was cool and quiet inside. I wandered the outer edge of the main room and came to an alcove, where a hand-drawn map of Nishu had been tacked to the wall. The houses were marked with the names of their former inhabitants—Clair Everett, Charles Yellow Bird, Nellie Red Fox, Benjamin Young Bird—and noted along the banks of the Missouri were forests Madeleine had told me about: cottonwoods tangled with grape vines; Juneberries, chokecherries, and plum trees; and, closer to the riverbank, diamond willow and sweet clover.
A man appeared beside me. A school group would soon arrive for a language lesson, he said, but he wanted to show me something first. I followed him into a room furnished with a table, a wool blanket, and a shelf draped in a shroud. Beneath the shroud was an Arikara bundle, the man said. The keeper of the bundle had put it there, since he was doing renovations on his house. Now people came all the time to pray. The man had seen tribal police officers in the room, as well as elders, and, in the summertime, the tribe paid thirty local youths to work in their community. The man, who helped run the program, brought his workers to pray as well. “They pray those troubles into the bundle,” he said, “and the bundle takes those troubles away.”
* * *
—
I ACCOMPANIED LISSA and CJ to a Yellow Bird reunion one summer. We left Fargo before midnight. Lissa pushed an Evanescence album into the stereo, and for an hour we just listened to the music until she asked if I would drive. By the time I pulled back onto the road, Lissa had fallen asleep.
The highway was empty, the moon set, the stars shining through the halo of our headlights. I wanted to change the music, but I was tired and afraid to take my eyes from the road. Near Garrison, I stopped the car and shook CJ awake, and slept as he drove the rest of the way. I woke when we turned onto the dirt track that led to Madeleine’s house. Lissa was still asleep in the passenger seat, the album thrumming on repeat. The windows of the house were dark, as were the windows of campers scattered throughout the yard. “Grandma’s man camp,” CJ joked. I pitched our tent facing east, but a pole was broken and in the end I gave up, wrapped myself in the
mesh, and tried to sleep.
I woke at dawn to the song of cicadas and birds. The air felt heavy, and the wind had picked up, flipping the cottonwood leaves onto their silvery backs. CJ and a cousin were shooting pellet guns from the porch. I went inside and found Lissa rifling through a kitchen cupboard. “Where do you diabetics keep your sugar?” she called into the living room. Madeleine was asleep in a chair, the television volume turned up high, but Cheryl was awake, sewing ribbons onto a powwow dress for her great-granddaughter.
“Say, is she dancing already?” Lissa said.
“You can’t keep her off the floor,” Cheryl replied.
We drank our coffee on the porch as the sun rose high and hot. Lissa’s uncles sat with their legs spread, their arms limp at their sides. Michael was talking about climate change, but it was hard to say if anyone was listening, and soon he changed the subject.
He had been reading about a Mandan man named Good Bird who had lived in Like-a-Fishhook, the village the three tribes occupied together before federal agents forced them out. “This man Good Bird talks about the difference between white and Indian policing,” Michael said. “When he was an eighteen-year-old boy, he tells his father, ‘Hey, the white Indian agent wants me to be a policeman.’ His dad said, ‘What did you say?’ ‘I said, “I can’t be a policeman. I’m way too young.” ’ The difference was, the Mandan didn’t hire young people to do the policing. Same thing for the Arikara. The police were older men who had achieved certain things in life. And it wasn’t just police. It wasn’t just the chief. The chief deferred to spiritual leaders. Men’s societies. Women’s societies. You had all these systems in place for balance.”
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