YELLOW BIRD

Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country

By Sierra Crane Murdoch

The Fort Berthold Reservation covers nearly a million acres of rolling hills and prairie in North Dakota and is home to the “Three Affiliated Tribes” of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara. The Missouri River, swollen by the presence of the Garrison Dam, transects the reservation from the northwest corner to the southeast. The tribes for whom Fort Berthold is home had for centuries been drawn to the Missouri River and its tributaries, where one could find the concentration of ecological wealth necessary to survive on the plains: wood, water, horses and game. In their early history the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara were numerous and widely dispersed, at times allied and at other times at odds. But as a result of pressure from both European settlers and more nomadic tribes on the plains, the three tribes were reduced and, eventually, clumped together — an affiliation of necessity, not always of choice.

The resources that initially drew the tribes to the river were stolen, and then stolen again, by the construction of the dam itself, which flooded a sixth of the reservation and destroyed many of the villages situated, for good reason, near the river. But there is wealth on the ground, and in some places there is wealth to be found in it. Since the 1950s, it’s been known that the Bakken Formation — a unique arrangement of rock spread over 200,000 miles underneath Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — contained billions of barrels of oil. Until recently, extracting it was prohibitively expensive. But with the advent of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling, the oil began to emerge. Oil companies started leasing tribal land at Fort Berthold, individual tribe members formed companies to truck and dispose of fracking waste, and the tribe itself got into the business.

In the old days, life on the plains had been a cycle of boom and bust; there is a rhythm to nature. It turns out there’s also a rhythm to wealth. As money began flowing at Fort Berthold, old traumas resurfaced and new ones were inflicted. On Feb. 22, 2012, Kristopher Clarke, a young trucker who drove for Blackstone — a white-owned firm that operated out of the tribal chairman Tex Hall’s garage before moving off the reservation — disappeared after dropping off his company credit card at the Blackstone office. He is feared dead.