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

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War can often be idealized, young men joining for various reasons, never imagining the horrors and hardships and seemingly surreal decisions they’ll have to make that can have so very unfortunate consequences.

What did he care if the living room walls were painted beige or blue after he had painted streets in blood?The book inspired me to take a deeper look into the indigenous female filmmaker community who are telling these stories. If you decide to read this book you will experience jaw dropping lyrical sentences describing the fear of combat, the futility of war, and the life that has to be rediscovered afterwards. I don't want to detract from the accomplishments of Powers by spilling the vitriol of my own issues with this war.

North Dakota is the only place in the country where somebody like me can go and make big money,” says one suspect.

In Yellow Bird, oilfield meets reservation, and readers meet a true-to-life Native sleuth unlike any in literature. Sierra Crane Murdoch takes a modest, ignored sort of American life and renders it large, with a murder mystery driving the action. In the end, for me at least, Powers obvious authorial talents cannot mask a rather hidebound plot and wafer-thin characters. I still stand by ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ – ‘grunt’ par excellence and very smart on politics. Could he ever tolerate the company of disagreeable persons when he had dismembered better men whom he frankly admired?

That might well serve as a refrain for this thoughtful work of true crime, its setting the badlands of North Dakota. It’s not her job, but a lot of Native Americans go missing and their cases remain unsolved, so families often ask Lissa for help. Would a barmaid in a German brothel really have ‘tears running down her mascara’ within seconds of an altercation with a GI? Powers was a soldier himself, and fought in Iraq, so there is a sense that this is a thinly veiled autobiography, particularly as Bartle's story is told in first person.Percy quotes the novel, writing: "Here we are, fretting over our Netflix queues while halfway around the world people are being blown to bits. Journalist and first-time author Sierra Crane Murdoch follows an Arikara woman named Lissa Yellow Bird who is determined to solve the mystery of a missing white oil worker on the North Dakota reservation where her family lives. I really wanted to like this, having been drawn to the back story and - like a lamb to the slaughter - the 'All Quiet on the Western Front' analogies. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. When we lived in the Philippines, there was a collision at an intersection where we were waiting at a four-way stop.

Much of the novel focuses on Bartle's promise to the mother of Murph, a fellow private, to not let him die in the war. But I had a strange shock from this book: the “casualty feeder card” kept by each field soldier under his helmet liner. These carefully designed books are split into achievable daily tasks aimed at inspiring whilst building confidence and bringing out the best in every child. Please note, our exam papers are for personal use only, they are not for multiple class or multiple pupil use.My only complaint was that the poetic framework of the book was sometimes exposed, as in the multiple, rapid fire use of the word "and" to try to push the narrative down into a stream of consciousness channel. It took years before I realized why they were all bandaged up, some on stretchers, some with gauze completely covering their eyes. I also felt that as a member of the tribe, she also had a particular, interesting perspective on the boom because she was someone who had left the reservation. For example, the first three chapters occur, successively, in September 2004 (in Al Tafar, Iraq), flashes back to December 2003 (for basic training at Fort Dix), and then jumps forward to March 2005 (to Germany, where Bartle and Sterling stop en route to America). Upon release she sees that her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, has become engulfed by the Bakken Oil Boom.