Yellow Bird, S C Murdoch

Tremendous reporting by Sierra. This is the type of book I like in this genre – thorough as hell, well-rounded and covering all the bases, taking you there from all viewpoints. When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, her home at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, had been transformed by the oil boom.  The landscape was now altered beyond recognition, her tribal government had become greedy bastards by corporate self-interests, and the whole community seemed plagued in violence and addiction. A few years later Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, 'KC' Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, but no one seemed to care or was bent on looking for him outside of his own Mother who lived in the upper west coast. This book traces Lissa's steps as she compulsively and fanatically hunts for clues to Clarke's disappearance. It’s an interesting perspective of her trying to navigate two worlds -- that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oil workers, down on their luck, who have come to find work with the economic recession. Her pursuit, we soon discover becomes an effort at redemption -- an atonement for her past crimes and working through generations of trauma. A terrifically written story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and a times manipulative. It’s a deep examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of trying to heal from that.