Murder Oil

Yellow Bird:

Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch. Random House, 2020, $28.00 cloth.

IF YOU listen to Tex Hall, the tribal chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) nation, the oil boom on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota is a cure for years of economic dependency on the United States government, a chance for tribal sovereignty. He prophesies a return to the self-sufficiency that the U.S. denied the MHA nation in 1945, when it stole the people’s land in order to build the Garrison Dam. “The white man thought they were going to put us on the badlands where nothing would grow,” he tells the journalist Sierra Crane Murdoch. “They flooded us and destroyed our economy.” Yet the oil that lies beneath the surface of this seemingly inhospitable land, a deep layer of shale that extends from Western North Dakota to Southern Saskatchewan, has endowed his people with sweet revenge. Finally, they have the opportunity to establish lasting economic independence. In fact, by 2015, five years into the boom, “one billion dollars would land in tribal coffers, placing it among the wealthiest tribes in the United States.” A casual observer might conclude that Tex Hall’s prediction has come true.

But not everyone sees it that way.