Sierra Crane Murdoch - Yellow bird: Oil, Murder, and a Womans Search for Justice in Indian Country

Every day they had to look at the land, from horizon to horizon, and every day the loss was with them; it was the dead unburied, and the mourning of the lost going on forever.

L ESLIE M ARMON S ILKO

Lets say he knows we need someone

to admire, and says a hero is a person

who blunders into an open cave,

and that it takes courage to blunder.

S TEPHEN D UNN

A MAN ONCE TOLD ME a story of how he dug up the bones of his relatives and held them in his hands. He is an old man now; then, he was young. He said he took the job because there were no others on the reservation and because the work was easier if a man did not think too hard about whose bones he was handling.

The reburials began in the summertime, in 1952, after the ground had thawed and the grass hung heavy with wood ticks. There were sixteen men, he said, two of them Native, and a foreman from Louisiana. The foreman did not seem to care, or perhaps he did not notice, when some of the men were careless with the bones and posed with them in various positions. The young man cared but did not say anything. He went on with his work. He placed the fragments in pine boxes, nailed the boxes shut, marked them with the names to which the bones apparently belonged.

The work lasted two summers, but the young man stayed just one and then enlisted in the Marines. His father, who had died the year before, was among the first laid in the new churchyard on the grasslands that rose from the Missouri River to the east edge of the reservation. The other families had left their villages by this time. In winter, when the river froze, the Army Corps of Engineers lifted houses onto pallets and pulled them over the ice. There would not be time to move all of the houses; nor would there be time to dig every grave. People would tell stories of heading for the bluffs, turning now and then to watch the water rise, though it did not happen quite like this. When the Garrison Dam was finished, the river came up slowly into the creases of the valleys palm, filling first the ditches and furrowed fields, and then climbing steps and spilling onto floors.

The churches were among the last structures to be moved, and it is said that the bells rang all the way to their new locations. Sunday services continued for a time, though they were poorly attended after the flood claimed the only roads on the reservation crossing the river, and after the people scattered on higher ground. One day, the young man returned to find his church emptied and the concrete grave markers grown over like stumps. People came now and then to carve their names in the church walls or to lay cigarettes and flowers on the graves of their relatives, but only at funerals did the living outnumber the dead. It would not take long for the prairie to claim the church, for wind to unhook the battens and shatter windows, and for rodents to make homes in the floors and walls. This became the nature of the reservation. A person could come home and find things taken or worn out. It was something you got used to, the inevitability of loss. The lake that rose in the rivers place was a shrine to this loss, to the things that had been and could be lost. Things pried from their foundations. Swept away with wood and bones. Pressed against the dam. Buried in the silt.