Season 1 of HBO’s True Detective is largely considered one of the best seasons of television of all time. Not only have the subsequent seasons failed to reach the bar set by the first season, they’ve generally been considered pretty bad, even without living in the shadow of McConaughey and Harrelson’s performance.
When season 4 launched, I watched with cautious optimism. It’s hard to go wrong when you cast a legend like Jodi Foster, and a brutal Alaska winter will always make an epic setting for any story.
Though season 4 started with a bang, ultimately it was a disappointment, but the vibe of the show struck a chord and it’s a topic I’ve dabbled in, in the past as a reader: the intersection between modern society, politics, and indigenous culture and rights.
The dissatisfactions with the show left a bit of an emotional hole in me, one that could only be filled by buying books.
After a bit of research, I found a few books that seemed to match the vibe of the show (which you can read here), with one of those books being Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch.
Yellow Bird was the only nonfiction to make the list, and it was also missing a key element that I was interested in reading about, and that is the cold and unforgiving climate of Alaska. So the book sat on my shelf for months, until recently when I turned my television back on…
The Inspiration to Read Yellow Bird
Another show that had a strong first season was Outer Range starring Josh Brolin. I had completely forgotten about the show until I saw that season 2 had recently been released. I sat down to watch the first episode of season 2 and realized I had almost no recollection of the story or characters from the first season.
This left me with a choice…should I rewatch season 1 or should I just read a book?
Outer Range is a hybrid Western and Sci-Fi. Set in modern day Wyoming, where a pensive and taciturn cattle rancher discovers a black hole on his property. While you may think the black hole is the star of the show, Outer Range is really a show driven by characters, and the complexities of the clash between modernity and tradition.
Without the patience to rewatch the first season, I went to my bookshelf in search of a book to scratch that Western itch, I saw Yellow Bird, sitting in my Indigenous Stories section, and knew it would do the trick.
Lissa Yellow Bird: An Anti-hero for the ages
Sierra Crane Murdoch’s 2020 nonfiction is a hybrid between a true crime, a family saga, and a political expose. Ostensibly it’s about a young man named Kristopher Clarke or “KC” who goes missing from an Indian reservation, and a woman’s search for him, but the reader will quickly find out, there is much more to this story.
The book’s main protagonist is Lissa Yellow Bird, a member of the MHA tribal nation in North Dakota. When Lissa hears about KC’s disappearance, she becomes obsessed with finding him. On its surface, this may sound like a noble act, but put into the context of Lissa’s life, it’s more a cause for concern to her family.
Lissa is the mother to 5 children, all with different men, she’s also recovering drug addict, and a convicted felon. Her relationship with her children is at best, complicated. After her release from prison, her kids are perplexed by her obsession with finding a missing white man, when for so long they’ve been kept from their own mom.
As Murdoch tells the story of Lissa’s life, we begin to love and hate her. Parents will empathize with her doing what she has to do for the sake of her children, juxtaposed with her seemingly bouts of selfishness, whether due to her addiction, or her strange obsession with searching for KC. Simultaneously we retrace the steps leading up to KC’s disappearance.
Yet there is a third layer to this story that elevates it beyond your typical Netflix-esque True Crime, and for me, this was the most interesting part of the story.
The Bird and the Moon
In David Grann’s 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon, we learn about the Osage
nation, who’s land just happens to be ripe with oil. While this may seem like a boon for the tribe, we quickly learn of all the devious ways the government and individual citizens sought to siphon that wealth from indigenous people living there. Whether it was archaic policy suppressing any autonomy Native Americans had with their money, or devious white men marrying indigenous women in order to funnel the money to themselves, the tragedy of the Osage nation in the early 19th century is another ugly blemish in American history.
I thought Grann’s book was good, but not great, and felt similarly about the movie. In the book, Grann tried to balance a story about individual people with the broader politics of the time, as well as a true crime element after a series of murders, but the story feels clunky and disjointed, and the reader never really gets to sink their teeth into any of those three elements.
To be sure, Grann was faced with the challenge of writing a story roughly 100 years old, but Yellow Bird, whether intentionally or not, takes that blueprint and builds something much more remarkable.
Yellow Bird demonstrates that in the last hundred years, not much has changed for Indigenous Americans. We continually corner them into smaller and smaller parcels of land, only to realize how valuable that land is, and find creative ways to maximize the profits while leaving scraps for the people that live there.
Around 2010, North Dakota, particularly the MHA tribe reservation, experienced an oil boom, this huge injection of cash into a formerly fairly impoverished community causes more problems than it solves. Intertribal politics bubble to the surface as some want to preserve their way of life on the rez, while others want to use the opportunity to personally profit, and others still don’t want to sell out their land unless it’s for a serious chunk of change.
Unsurprisingly this injection of cash into the hands of people who developed drug habits to cope with the oppressive life on the rez now suddenly have access to all of the drugs they could ever want.
To further complicate matters, the boom attracts waves of non tribal members to the rez. Not only does this increase the clash between different cultures and classes, but it highlights the need for policy reform as jurisdiction for tribal and non tribal authorities is convoluted depending on who is committing what crimes, where and against whom.
Murdoch seamlessly blends the story of Lissa’s life, the disappearance of KC, and the complicated politics of the oil boom together, helping the reader visualize how all of these elements are connected, to tell a much more impactful and dynamic story.
While Killers of the Flower Moon is a worthwhile book, and all of these indigenous stories are important pieces of American history, Yellow Bird takes the reader to places that Killers of the Flower Moon simply couldn’t go.