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 an 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.
The danger of writing a book about someone with a cultural and political background that most people know nothing about is that a reader might begin to think they understand everything about that kind of person because they read the book. The book fills a void that should have been filled by public school curriculum. A reader who has never met a Native American might believe that every woman of that identity is like Lissa, when in reality, Lissa, whose experiences indeed are common, is the most iconoclastic person I know.
The question of who has the right to tell whose story became a subject of impassioned conversation among writers and other artists around the time that I was working on this book. In 2017, in an address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Joyce Carol Oates argued for “more, not less trespassing.” “Perhaps it’s a worthier challenge to tell the stories of others,” she said, “with as much care as if they were our own.” Artists, she added, should not “be surprised when they do provoke hostile reactions. This is the price we pay for our commitment to bearing witness in a turbulent America.” Meanwhile, in his column for the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole challenged the argument that “we have a responsibility to tell one another’s stories and must be free to do so.” This thinking is “seductive but flawed,” he wrote. “The responsibility toward other people’s stories is real and inescapable, but that doesn’t mean that appropriation is the way to satisfy that responsibility….It is not about taking something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you but rather about recognizing that history is brutal and unfinished and finding some way, within that recognition, to serve the dispossessed.”
While I admit these discussions gave me considerable anxiety, I am grateful for them in that they led me to have honest conversations with Lissa and her relatives about my role in their lives and in the story I had chosen to tell. From these conversations, I made two decisions. First, I involved Lissa in my process to a degree that some journalists would consider a liability but in my case proved essential. After I wrote several drafts, I brought the book to Lissa, and we read it together from beginning to end. Although we had talked about how I was approaching the story, I believe this was the first time Lissa fully understood my intentions. Not only did she correct my errors, but she helped me see the book’s weaknesses and encouraged me to not withhold difficult material but go deeper. I repeated this process with Shauna, Irene, and Madeleine, reading parts aloud to them, and in this way, they all helped me get closer to the truth.
The second decision I made was to put myself in the book. I did this for several reasons. I wanted to be clear who was telling this story—who heard it, interpreted it, chose which details to leave in or out—and convey to readers my limitations as a narrator. Writing from the first person also allowed me to let people talk instead of constantly having to paraphrase their thoughts or fit their quotes into a particular scene. But perhaps most important, it felt honest. Not long after I met Lissa, it occurred to me that she conscripts the people around her into her story, that I could not separate myself from her, and that in the years we would spend together, she would influence my life and I, hers. I wrote Yellow Bird at the collision point of two communities—one Native, the other not. As a white writer drawn into the fray, I was a part of that story. “The real fantasy,” Zadie Smith has written, “is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them….There is no getting out of our intertwined history.”
I wrote that “I don’t know why Lissa trusted me, and I don’t think she knows either.” We remember differently how this project began. I remember sitting in her kitchen, my second time visiting Fargo, and asking how she would feel if I made the story about her. She did not answer me then. She remembers walking in the badlands some weeks later when I asked if I could write the book. I was chasing behind her, trying to keep up. She turned and said, “I’ll think about it.”
What we both remember is how this trust grew over a long period of time. In some ways, our relationship was traditionally journalistic. We signed no contracts, exchanged no money in the course of my reporting besides the gas and meals I bought now and then and the bit of cash I once sent her when she was broke. In the thousands of hours we spent together and the hundreds more on the phone, I either held my notebook or kept my recorder running. But in all this time, it also was inevitable that we drew close—not just as friends, but as something more intimate and specific: a woman who decided to tell another woman everything about herself.
Being white was not my only limitation as I wrote this book. I am a daughter but not yet a mother. I am a woman, but I have not lived as long as Lissa has, nor have I survived as much as she has survived. There were many things I did not understand when I began, but that is the job of a journalist—to ask about what you don’t yet know, and then to listen. So I listened to Lissa, to her children, to her mother, grandmother, and uncles, and to everyone else whose stories make up this book. Do I understand their lives in all their complexity? I doubt it. But I understand more than I did eight years ago, and I have done my best to render this story in a way that I hope feels true and meaningful to the people who shared it with me.
May 21, 2019