Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

Product Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it—an urgent work of literary journalism.
“I don’t know a more complicated, original protagonist in literature than Lissa Yellow Bird, or a
more dogged reporter in American journalism than Sierra Crane Murdoch.”—William Finnegan,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
Barbarian Days
In development as a Paramount+ original series
WINNER OF THE OREGON BOOK AWARD • NOMINATED FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Publishers Weekly
When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him.
Yellow Bird traces Lissa’s steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke’s disappearance. She navigates two worlds—that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession. Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma.
Yellow Bird is an exquisitely written, masterfully reported story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and—when it serves her cause—manipulative. Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing.
Amazon.com Review
Three stories overlap in
Yellow Bird and any one of the three would make for an interesting book on its own. Primarily it’s a true crime story about the disappearance and murder of an oil-worker named K.C. Clarke and Lissa Yellow Bird—a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes—who, obsessively some would say, hunted his killer for years. But author Sierra Crane Murdoch also lays out the history of oil drilling on the reservation, the booms and the busts, and the complex legacy of exploitation that shackled the fate of the tribe to that of Big Oil. And finally,
Yellow Bird’s also about addiction and recovery, zooming in on the way Lissa, a meth addict fresh out of prison, channeled the same addictive impulses that landed her in prison into the search for K.C. Clarke. And how a case she took on while newly-sober gave her additional purpose: Lissa ended up traveling to conferences across America, calling attention to the high rates at which Indigenous people went missing and to the low resolution rate for such missing person cases. Murdoch’s seven years of research allow for an intimate portrait of a resilient woman who believes she’s “paying a debt to society, making up for the harm she had caused,” making this fascinating story so much more than a true crime tale.
—Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Book Review
Review
“Sierra Crane Murdoch has written a deft, compelling account of an oil field murder and the remarkable woman who made it her business to solve it. I can’t stop thinking and talking about this book.”
—Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites
“This book is a detective story, and a good one, that tells what happens when rootless greed collides with rooted culture. But it’s also a classic slice of American history, and a tale of resilience in the face of remarkable tra