Amidst North Dakota's fracking boom, people keep disappearing

Lissa Yellow Bird knows something about how to find a body in the badlands of North Dakota. To outsiders, the landscape might appear empty and unchanging, but to Yellow Bird, it looks dynamic — different in every season. She is attuned to how April’s snowmelt washes away sediment and carves rivulets into the land; to the way the heavy rains in the fall can erase tracks; to how the winter’s snow can bring new shapes into relief. “The land would reveal what it wanted to us,” journalist Sierra Crane Murdoch recalls Yellow Bird explaining. “The point was not to force the land to give up the body but to be there when it did.”

For eight years, Yellow Bird has helped grieving family members search for missing relatives. In her sprawling and richly detailed debut book, Yellow Bird, Murdoch, a former High Country News contributing editor, tells the story of Yellow Bird’s first search.

Kristopher “KC” Clarke disappeared while working on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation during the fracking boom of the early 2010s, and Yellow Bird helped his family look for him. As she describes Yellow Bird’s efforts, Murdoch also does her own excavating, trying to uncover the connections between the region’s settler colonial history and its ongoing human disappearances. The result is an illuminating book that draws a complex portrait of Yellow Bird as well as of life in Fort Berthold during the boom and the historical context of the region’s disappearances.

In the 2010s, the Fort Berthold Reservation — home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also called the Three Affiliated Tribes — underwent extraordinary upheaval, as a fracking boom brought unprecedented money and an influx of outsiders to the reservation. Clarke, a 29-year-old white man from northwest Washington, vanished in 2012 from the reservation, where he moved after a breakup. At the time of his disappearance, Clarke was working for a friend’s trucking company, which hauled water to drilling sites. “The work had been so good, (his mother) learned, that her son hardly slept,” Murdoch writes. Clarke was completely burned out, and at his employer’s suggestion, he took a vacation. He never returned. Authorities began investigating about a month later, but the case stalled with few leads.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.5/ideas-books-amidst-north-dakotas-fracking-boom-people-keep-disappearing
(High Country News)