“Balance of power,” said a cousin.
“Sovereignty,” said another.
Lissa had been listening quietly. Now she said, “You know what Tex’s new phrase should be?” She was thinking of his marijuana business and paused for effect: “Sovereignty by the kilo.”
“Ayyyee,” said Michael. “Tex Hall Kush.”
In the midafternoon, we gathered beneath an awning. Irene, in tinted glasses and a floral shirt, stood with a microphone. She spoke with dry confidence, listing the family’s latest accomplishments, not excluding her daughter’s. She liked to tease Lissa while everyone was listening. “Am I missing or am I dead?” she would say. “Because my daughter has finally arrived!”
Irene had been calling Lissa a lot lately, wondering when she would visit next. Now and then, Lissa arrived home to her apartment in Fargo to a package from her mother: Two sticks of lip balm—“One for your purse, one for your car,” a note instructed; a sweatshirt that read PRINCESS. While other relatives expressed surprise that Lissa had been “right about all those people,” Irene denied ever disbelieving her daughter and seemed to be making a more obvious effort to take her side. Recently, Irene had seen Tex at a funeral. “He came over and gave me a hug and little kiss,” she would tell me. “I said, ‘You know, if Wayne was alive, you would have never got in all this trouble. He would have been right there saying, ‘Don’t do that.’ He would have protected you.’ ” Tex had smiled. “I said, ‘Now you behave.’ ”
Others took turns at the microphone. They cursed the oil industry, extolled the virtues of education, told stories that made their relatives laugh. Then a small woman stood. She began in Arikara and turned to English. “I want to pray because there’s been a lot of loss in this family,” she said. “We all experienced pain. It’s going to take some time, because when you go through loss and suffering, you have to allow that time to let go and just let God’s spirit and power come in, fix you and make you whole. Do you know that there is no blood in heaven? There’s only light. Some of you may have dreams, visions. Some of you may have the experience of encountering that light. And when you come into that light, you begin to get your strength back, your healing, your understanding of your purpose. On this reservation, we have a lot to overcome, and we will overcome it. The atrocities, the injustice, all of the things that we feel that the government has taken from us.”
I glanced at Lissa. Her shoulders were bare, turning pink in the sun.
“Creator, God,” the small woman prayed. “Through all the trauma, through all the pain, through all the suffering that we experience, the wounding of our spirit, you are the one that can bring healing. I pray right now that you will start with these little babies, touch these children, protect them, keep them, nurture them, help them to grow up to be strong, O God, and not have the effects of the trauma, the things that we had to go through in our lives that caused us, O God, to do things that aren’t pleasing in your sight. Forgive us, because we didn’t know the damage that caused our spirit to be broken. Lord, I pray that you will heal that emptiness. You blessed us with resources. Let us not be foolish and waste them. And Lord, pray for our leaders. Pray for them, Father. We ask that you give them wisdom and understanding, Lord God. Don’t let the enemy mislead and guide them and direct them on a path that’s selfish, but like our great leaders, help our people overcome all our addictions and our pains, to bring the healing of our trauma and all of the things that caused the brokenness of our spirit, Lord God. Mend and heal our spirit, O God. Renew and strengthen our mind, body, and soul, so that we can be a blessing to one another and our families.”
Her voice rose above the shouts of children on the trampoline, above the singing of girls inside the house, above the pop cans hissing open and forks scraping styrofoam plates, above the cries of babies bouncing on fathers’ laps and the whine of dogs at their feet.
Only Madeleine was entirely still. She sat at a table in the middle of it all, her eyes closed, her feet pressed together, her head rested on fisted hands.
* * *
—
I TURNED TO Lissa again, but she had gone. In the distance, I could see her climbing steps to her grandmother’s house. I followed and found her in the kitchen fixing a plate of food. She was going with some cousins to the cemetery to leave offerings on the family graves.
We rode together out the long, dirt drive and south toward the lake.
Lissa was thinking of Chucky again. The night before he died, he had reminded her of the time she had forgiven her mother—before KC disappeared, after Lissa went on the road trip to Idaho with Percy, where they had visited Percy’s mother. On her way home from Idaho, Lissa had stopped at the farmhouse in White Shield and found Madeleine, Chucky, and Irene seated in the living room. She forced her mother into a tight hug. Mom, I want you to know that everything I held against you, I forgive you for that, she had said, and when she let go, Irene had run into the kitchen—embarrassed, Lissa thought.
But that was not what mattered, Chucky said.
“He told me, ‘I watched your mom’s face, but more important, I watched your grandma’s face. I could see something go over her that was healing for her, too.’ He told me, ‘Everyone always said I was the smartest Yellow Bird, but it was actually you. You found peace with all that trauma.’ ”
The lake stretched so far ahead of us that it might have been an ocean.
This was her burden: to bring up their bodies, to let go their spirits, to bury their bones, again.
Lissa searches for KC in Mandaree, summer 2015. Photograph by Kalen Goodluck
Author’s Note
IN THE FALL OF 2010, I left the coalfields of Virginia where I had been living for a little over a year. The county where I lived was in a final phase of extraction. A third of the land had been stripped of trees and topsoil as companies scratched away at what coal remained. Even industry men told me that in twenty years the coal would be gone. I had witnessed the very end of a boom-and-bust cycle, and so, when I arrived on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation the following spring, I understood immediately what I was seeing: the beginning.
As I returned to the reservation over the years to report for High Country News and then for other magazines, it became clear to me that the oil boom within the reservation borders was different from other booms. The MHA Nation is a sovereign entity with rights to govern like those of a state and its own laws and regulations determining how outside interests gain access to its resources. It is also, as federal case law puts it, a “domestic dependent nation.” The tribe’s dependency on the United States has been manufactured and reinforced by more than a century of federal policies designed to undermine the sovereignty of tribes and assimilate their citizens into European American society. While in recent decades the federal government has given back to tribes some rights it took, it is this legacy of paternalism that left the MHA Nation uniquely vulnerable to exploitation throughout the boom. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the ways in which the tribe suffered most—the sale of its leases at rates below market value, the surge in crime due to an influx of drugs and perpetrators over whom the tribe had no jurisdiction, and vast ecological devastation—were the province of federal authorities.
For all the ways the reservation was unique, I also saw it as a microcosm of America—a place to which people starved of opportunity would flock, and a place where I could observe the machinations of industry: how it secured access to land; how it sought and fostered insiders; and how it widened divisions within the community between those who had and those who had not.
These were the conditions in which James Henrikson gained access to Fort Berthold, and when I first read of his alleged crimes in February 2014, ten months before I met Lissa, I saw his story—and Kristopher Clarke’s story—as inextricable from the story of the reservation.
That October, I returned to Fort Berthold intending to write a
n article about the tribal election. I was interested in how Clarke’s murder and the ensuing revelations about Tex Hall’s link to Henrikson had cost Hall his political career and emboldened a growing number of tribal members to speak out against the oil industry. But when I met Lissa the evening of the election, my sense of the story shifted. Here was a woman who had known the story—or at least suspected it—long before others chose to believe it. As with Henrikson’s crimes, the revelations regarding Hall had not risen out of nothing. Lissa had spent years trying to convince even her fellow tribal members that Henrikson murdered Clarke. Until Doug Carlile was killed, she said, “nobody believed me.”
Even after Henrikson went to trial—when it was irrefutable what he had done—people would remark to Lissa and me how “unbelievable” the story was. It certainly was unusual. None of the prosecutors or investigators I spoke to could think of another serial-hirer-of-murder who had acted outside a criminal organization. But I wondered if the believability of a story had less to do with the rarity of its details than with the way a story is told. In the years that I worked on this book, the murders earned many takes, including on several television crime shows. In each episode, the reservation was a side note—at most, a plot device. But what was the story of the murders without the story of the reservation? It became sensational, and sensational was not how Lissa saw it. In choosing to make this book about Lissa, I chose to tell the story of the murders in the way she first saw them and believed them to be true—that is, amid their historical context, the valuing of wealth over Indigenous lives and over life in general. Henrikson’s violence, Lissa believed, was not so uncommon as most would think. His was the violence of America.
* * *
—
I RELIED MOST heavily on three types of source material in the making of Yellow Bird: Public records I acquired through databases and requests, including the video and audio recordings of the interviews law enforcement conducted while investigating the murders of Clarke and Carlile; Lissa’s extensive email, Facebook, and text message record, as well as photographs and audio recordings she took to document her search for Clarke; and my interviews with Lissa and more than two hundred other sources, among them tribal members, case witnesses, investigators, and prosecutors, as well as acquaintances from Lissa’s past and members of her family. Neither James Henrikson nor Sarah Creveling replied to my interview requests. I did meet Jill Williams, who was not interested in speaking with me, and so I relied on the messages she exchanged with Lissa to piece together her sections. After my interview with Tex Hall in November 2014, he did not respond to my requests for additional interviews. I also was unable to interview Darrik Trudell due to a Department of Homeland Security policy that would have required me to show the whole manuscript to the agency and allow it to issue redactions. Through interviews with his colleagues in the Department of Justice, FBI, and North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigations, and with public records and Lissa’s own documentation, I was able to reconstruct his role in the story.
To write about the history and contemporary politics of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, I consulted a variety of works whose authors and creators I acknowledge at the end of this note, among them Angela Parker, a member of the MHA Nation whose dissertation helped me immensely in understanding the politics of the reservation. I am deeply indebted to Marilyn Hudson, Ed Hall, and Theodora and Joletta Bird Bear—thorough, careful chroniclers of their tribe’s history—whose documents and memories also proved essential to my grasp of tribal politics following the flood. And I was extraordinarily lucky to encounter so much historical knowledge among the Yellow Birds, not only from Madeleine and Irene, but also from Lissa’s uncle Loren, a historian for the National Park Service, and her “dad,” Michael, a university professor whose writings on decolonization I found tremendously helpful to my own thinking.
All of the dialogue in this book I took directly from interviews, audio and video files, and correspondence Lissa shared with me, which I edited for concision and clarity. Lissa provided audio recordings of several scenes for which I was not present—among them, her visit with KC’s grandfather in Oregon—and when I had no audio or video on which to base my reconstruction, I spoke to others who had been present and wrote the scene from their collaborative memories. To re-create Lissa’s visit to Judd Parker, for example, I asked them both about the visit separately and found their memories remarkably similar: Lissa told me Judd shared a story about watching a man die in a truck accident; Judd confirmed he told Lissa this story; and then Judd told me the same story in the manner he originally shared it with Lissa. If a person did not remember a scene another shared with me, or the person remembered it differently, I indicated their disagreement in the book. Several times—most notably in scenes with Chucky—the other person present was unavailable or deceased by the time Lissa told me the story. In those cases, the person’s quotes came directly from Lissa or whomever else recalled the scene.
One of the advantages of spending years immersed in another person’s life is that you see the patterns of her memory. I have spent enough time with Lissa, now, that I frequently hear her recalling for other people certain events for which I was also present. If my own memory is accurate, then hers rarely has seemed wrong or inventive, but I find it interesting to hear which details rise to the top for her and what meaning she draws from them. Her mind, I have learned, is a trap for visual detail—attuned, in particular, to the absurd. Lissa also has an uncanny knack for dialogue; often she would recall a conversation from years earlier, and later, as I sorted her text messages, I would find this conversation nearly verbatim. Her memory is perhaps most unreliable when it comes to time. Lissa often mixed up the order of events or could not recall the specific year in which something had happened. Thankfully, the records she shared with me were extensive and her digital life so active that I was able to build a detailed timeline. I knew exactly when she and Percy mailed the flyers, for example, or when she went to the sweat lodge.
I spent a lot of time retracing her steps. I saw the Ferris wheel in Seattle; the courthouse in Bend; the property in Sweet Home where Robert Clarke’s trailer once stood. I located the priest she had known in prison, as well as the proprietor of the Portland lingerie modeling shop who had not spoken to Lissa in twenty years and still knew her only as Nadia Reinardy. I went to the laundry where she had worked in Fargo, and the welding shop. One weekend, she showed me the places in the Twin Cities where she had lived. She insisted I meet OJ.
She shared far more with me than I put in this book. I was overwhelmed by the quantity of material, by the task of deciding what to leave out. It took years to understand which details, quotes, and anecdotes felt necessary and representative. I listened for clues: What stories made Lissa laugh and cry? What stories made her shake with indignation? What stories did she tell so many times that eventually I could recite them myself? While I had some sense of what the book was about from my own reporting on the reservation, it was during the time I spent with Lissa that the themes naturally emerged. Intergenerational trauma was not something I asked her to discuss. It was something she and her relatives brought up again and again until I realized its place in her story.
* * *
—
BY NOW, I have spent eight years returning to North Dakota, more time than I have spent in my adult life returning to anywhere else. It was my familiarity with the place and people there that allowed me to see the potential of this story as it emerged—the threads connecting one person I knew to another, the political and ecological landscape whose patterns of change I had already observed—but I was not without limitations when I wrote this book. My primary limitation was that I am white. I was writing about, and often from the perspective of, a woman who is a citizen of both a tribal nation and the United States, who identifies as Arikara, and whose dual citizenship and cultural and racial identity have been defining features of her life.
A
question hovered over me as I wrote: What right did I have to tell Lissa’s story? When I brought this question to Lissa, she dismissed it. As you know by now, she does not have much patience for hand-wringing. She lives to cross boundaries, to defy categorization. She had given me permission to write this book, and so she figured I should go ahead and write it.
I did, but still I worried. Could I actually capture the way she thought and felt? Would my biases cloud or falsify her truth? Was I applying my own frame to her story? Had I listened to her closely enough?
I thought about these things every day I sat to write. I spoke about them, too—to friends and colleagues, to Lissa and her relatives. I heard a range of opinions. On one side, I was told not to worry about my whiteness and to go ahead and tell the story exactly how I wanted to tell it. On the other, I was warned it was not my place to be writing this story at all. An uncle of Lissa’s admitted to me in an interview that he had no interest in reading a book about Native Americans written by a non-Native person. I thought to myself, Fair enough. Certainly, the first writers I turn to—whom I trust to tell the truth about Indian Country—are Native, and among them are many of the best American writers to emerge in the past fifty years. But there is also a legacy of white writers defining the way most people think—or don’t think—about Indigenous people. I know this legacy has done enormous damage to our country by allowing our governments to justify or conceal acts of genocide and leading so many people to believe that Native Americans no longer exist, rendering modern tribal nations and their citizens invisible.
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