Yellow Bird: Oil, murder, and woman's search for justice in Indian country by Sierra Crane Murdoch was a book I picked up in a search to understand indigenous Americans a little better. It is one of quite a few on my reading list.
Completed: 1/19/2021
Recommendation: Mildly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody
Review:
This book is about the reservation. Murdoch explains this in the Author's Note and that would have been much more helpful up front. I kept thinking that this was basically a murder mystery, so it was hard for me to figure out why the protagonist's grandmother was a traditional dancer and you could tell that because she did not wear fancy clothing and you could see the grace of her footwork. Why does this matter to a story about a murder? I could not figure it out and felt that Murdoch just had trouble "sifting through the details" to find a story. The insight into intergenerational trauma is profound. The web of webs format of the book (a is connected to b connected to c connected to a whole other web) made it hard for me to put the story on a hook. Because there were so many "hooks" I got caught in the trees and could not discern the forest. The Author's Note (had it been up front) would have offered some good hooks on which I could have hung the parts of the story and could have gotten so much more from it.
It was also interesting to hear Murdoch argue that one should not generalize from this story and assume that it is characteristic of all indigenous people. This is one piece of a very complicated puzzle. While it offers some degree of understanding, it is not generalizable. That is the way I approached it and it is good to see that I, at least, got that right.
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