Yellow Bird Quotes

“This was the paradox of trauma: To heal from it, you had to know where it came from and then, in a sense, disbelieve it. You had to trust you were more than the damage done to you. No matter how much others made you suffer, you had to cease seeing yourself as a victim.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“It was not, as people sometimes said, that they had nothing left to live for. It was that the living became too much.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“It was remarkable all the things the tribe was told it needed when suddenly it had money.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“The dams on the Upper Missouri, called the Pick-Sloan Plan, were located so as not to disturb white settlements. Instead, they would flood the bottomlands of eight reservations, land guaranteed to tribes by treaty and home to thousands of families. Pick-Sloan, the Lakota historian Vine Deloria, Jr., wrote, was “the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“We work hard. We retire at sixty. We go golfing or run around a nude colony. That’s the American dream. Quick money. Dodge diesels and women and drinking beers with your buddies. And there’s camaraderie in that. We all felt like we were really doing something. We were contributing to the economy. But that’s what sucks about money. When it’s gone, you figure out it’s not even real. It’s just a dopamine rush. We know what an oil field does. We know what drugs do. We know these things wreck everything about the human spirit, but we keep doing them.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“Everybody moved on without me. I got so wrapped up in this case, and when I looked up, everybody was gone.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“Her precociousness hardened into defiance, and her defiance broke into a reckless rage that scared even her own mother.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“There’s too many spirits in there,” Dennis told Lissa. Dennis wanted to burn the house down, and Lissa agreed. If the house was gone, her memories might return to her, she thought, but as it was, Lissa felt nothing for the house, and this nothing reminded her of her family’s loss. “At least when it’s gone you can romanticize it,” she said.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“The tribe was unprepared for the boom, he believed. After centuries of colonization—of federal entities weakening and displacing tribal institutions—it did not have the resources, let alone the expertise or regulatory power, to control the oil industry. It had no environmental agency to monitor leaks or spills; no transportation department to track trucks; and what was more troubling, it had no criminal jurisdiction over the thousands of non-Native men and women who had come to work, since the U.S. Supreme Court had stripped tribes nationwide of the right to criminally prosecute nonmembers. “It’s like the lottery winners you see on TV,” Fox said. “Their lives get worse, because they’re not ready for it. We’re the same way. My biggest fear is that we end up like other reservations I know—industry comes in, money’s thrown around, everyone celebrates for a while, and when industry leaves, the reservation is in worse shape than before.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“I began to feel like a doctor recording the early symptoms of an illness—the oil boom, like an illness, was all anyone wanted to talk about. Yet I also detected in my conversations with tribal members a sense of awe that their fortune had so suddenly reversed. The boom had just begun.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“The casino was at the center of a constellation of transactions. I saw fishermen come to fish the lake; a woman looking for a job; elders cracking crab legs at the casino buffet—one of two restaurants on the reservation that served breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and a steady flow of men in suits. One morning, I watched a tour bus disgorge a hundred elderly passengers and learned they had come from a senior center in Bismarck. They were among the few patrons I saw come solely for the slots. The other gamblers were oil workers and tribal members, many of whom lived in the lodge.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“Percy and Lissa shared a father, but as far as Lissa was concerned, calling him her “half brother” was a “white thing.” A brother was just a brother, no halves about it.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“When the waters came” was how they described the flood, as if to remind themselves they had no choice in the matter.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“There were roads where she had never seen roads before, curving through pasture like suburban culs-de-sac. Even the contours of the land had changed, cliffs cut, hills reshaped, as if giants had pressed their fingers into clay. It was her first sight of the oil boom.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“The land scrunched like a dry blanket, where the flatness of the prairie gave way to badlands, to canyons cut by seasonal creeks.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“She had been prepared to serve her entire sentence and had practiced thinking in geologic terms: “Like, the dinosaurs,” she said. If life was just a fleck on the timeline of the universe, then her sentence was too brief to appear. This had made it easier to shrug off the time she already lost—ten years to addiction, what were ten more? Not until she boarded the prison van to Fargo had her sense of time shrunk again, and not until she saw her sons had it become clear to her how long—two years—she had been away.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“She focused on each day as if a routine life—billing accounts, file transfers, doctor appointments, school enrollment—might accumulate into an opaque wall dividing the present from her past.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“Lissa had a ready laugh, I noticed, the bearing of a woman who derives entertainment from the absurdities of the world.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“Lissa was set on being the best at everything she did. The best drug dealer. The most dogged bondswoman. The eventual leader of each organization she joined.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“Lissa’s obsessions came in all forms, sudden and indiscriminate, but each one she had taken on with the faith and focus of a zealot.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

“A man once told me a story of how he dug up the bones of his relatives and held them in his hands.”
― Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country