Crime novelist explores MMIW in 'Where They Last Saw Her'
Frank ZufallWisconsin Examiner
Marcie Rendon, author of 'Where They Last Saw Her,' spoke at the Muir Library in Winnebago in southern Minnesota last Tuesday, where a group of 15-20 white women from a conservative, Republican-leaning farming community came to hear the Native American author talk about her recently published book.
The crime novel explores the theme of Native American women who are missing or murdered.
Rendon is a member of the White Earth Nation in northwest Minnesota who now lives in Minneapolis.
The story begins with the protagonist, Quill, a Native American wife and mother of two, who is jogging on the reservation when she hears a woman scream. That scream sends her into panic, which later leads to an investigation.
Rendon told the admiring audience that she is a crime junkie who loves to create page-turners, and that her goal with the new book wasn't to provide a sociological study of Indigenous life, but to tell a good story.
However, Rendon framed the book's accounts of missing Native American women taken from a reservation and an infant kidnapped from a Walmart to the movement recognizing the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIW/R).
Early on, Crow, Quill's husband, expresses concern about his wife risking her safety chasing down information on the possible identity of the woman she heard screaming:
'We've been hearing these horror stories of four thousand, maybe five thousand women missing across Canada. Missing down here. The stories of what has happened to women and children' – he emphasized children – 'in the man camps over the Dakotas. And they are here now.' He jabbed two fingers onto the table when he said the word now. 'Those same men are here now.' He jabbed the table again. 'I don't want anyone from my family to go missing. To end up dead in a ditch or a river. No. Not on my watch.'
When the book club members had an opportunity to ask Rendon questions, they didn't focus on the plotline of the story but on the larger MMIW/R issue, what's behind it and what could be done to address it.
In mainstream culture, Rendon responded, Native Americans are seen as invisible and their problems have not been taken as seriously.
'When I go out East to talk, most people out there think we're all dead; that we disappeared with, I don't know, the Black Hills gold rush, which also makes it easier for us to disappear if people don't think we exist,' she said. 'How can you disappear if you don't exist?'
Although the MMIW/R issue has benefited from more public discussions, such as the May 5 MMIW/R Day of Awareness, Rendon said, when she was recently in Madison, she met a college professor who had never heard of the issue.
'Where They Last Saw Her' is an example of a work of fiction that raises awareness of a real crisis and provides insights into subcultures and their struggles.
In 2018, as part of a statewide program called Wisconsin Reads, several book clubs around the state collectively read and discussed 'The Round House' by Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota. That book also raised awareness of struggles on Native American reservations and, in particular, the complication of prosecuting a crime when there are competing jurisdictional authorities between a tribal nation and county and state authorities.
Rendon is also the author of the 'Cash Blackbear' series, which involves a Native American 19-year-old woman who solves crimes in the Red River area of Minnesota/North Dakota in the 1970s. She said her editor at Bantam asked her about writing another book outside the series.
'She said, 'Well, what's the current issue in Indian Country?' and I said, 'missing and murdered Indian women.''
However, Rendon was initially reluctant to write a story around the MMIW/R issue.
'I said, 'there's no resolution. If somebody's missing or murdered, there's no happy ending,' she said. 'There's no resolution to the story. They're either dead or they're still missing.''
Rendon's story is set in Minnesota at a fictional tribe on the outskirts of Duluth, Minnesota, where in real life there had been a major pipeline project on a reservation in the area, like the one in her book — the replacement of Line 3 by Enbridge on the Fond du Lac Reservation, completed in 2021.
Prior to the Line 3 permit being approved, there had been concerns by Native American groups about man camps and violence and harassment against Native women.
A 2021 article by The Guardian, 'Sexual violence along pipeline route follows Indigenous women's warnings,' reported that a local crisis center for survivors of violence had 'received more than 40 reports about Line 3 workers harassing and assaulting women and girls who live in northwestern Minnesota.'
Rene Ann Goodrich, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, and a member of the Wisconsin MMIW/R Task Force is one of several Ojibwe women from Northern Wisconsin who have also expressed concern over Enbridge replacing a portion of Line 5, currently located on the Bad River Reservation, but Enbridge has filed for permits to build outside the reservation. Besides environmental concerns, the new project could result in a man camp in the area and possible assaults against Native women.
Rendon said there is a strong relationship between the extractive industry and the MMIW/R issue, and she makes a strong correlation between the two in her book.
'Anytime you have an extractive industry, like the pipelines, gold mines, uranium mines, anytime you have an extractive industry where large groups of men are pulled in to do the extraction, there's no police force. They show up without their wives and families. They show up without ministers or priests. It's just like the Wild West,' she said. 'There has to be something done about the extractive industries and this use of men in large groups to actually go out and do these extractive industries. I don't know how you change this. But I think that awareness is a piece of it.'
However, Rendon said she had heard that some oil companies have responded to concerns about man camps by putting men up in hotels with their families.
'Talk about the power of women, right? Bringing your wife and she'll make you go to church,' she said.
Rendon said it was vital for her to portray Native American women in a community. In the story, three women, Quill and her friends Punk and Gaylyn, often travel together as they pursue information about missing women or help with searches.
'In Native communities, you almost never do anything alone,' she said. 'You know, if I'm going to go to the grocery store, somebody's with me. There's one family that, if you see them at the pow wow — if you see them at the grocery store, if you see them downtown, in the courthouse — it's the mom, the grandma, the kids, you know; it's like, it's a whole group,' she said.
Regarding Native women and community, Rendon notes it was Indigenous/First Nation women in Canada who first gathered together and spoke out about the phenomenon of Indigenous women missing around the man camps of oil pipelines and mining operations.
'I knew that in this story about missing and murdered Indian women, what was important to me was a community of women, and so I knew that it wasn't going to be just one person,' she said.
Rendon said she has received some criticism for including a male Native American who is abusive.
'We have bad people in our communities, too,' she said, 'and then there's the thing about domestic abuse, it happens in every community and in smaller communities. People know that it happens, but people don't talk about it, or there's this secrecy and stuff that happens around it.'
In Minnesota, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) reports there were 716 Indigenous persons missing in that state in 2024, 57% of whom were women.
In Wisconsin the exact number of missing Indigenous persons is not published, in part because the state does not have a clearinghouse like Minnesota for gathering that data.
Rendon praised efforts in Minnesota to create an MMIW/R office that tracks MMIW/R cases, works with families, and provides support and even rewards for information. And she noted that in Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protectors Movement, a branch of the American Indian Movement, is active in putting out flyers and organizing searches for missing persons.
In researching the novel, Rendon said she was surprised by how often white women who went missing were blamed for causing their own victimization through their behavior, including having multiple sexual partners. In Native American communities, she said, there isn't that cloud of guilt over women.
'The Native community clearly has said, 'I don't care what our women were doing, nobody deserves to be trafficked. Nobody deserves to end up dead in a ditch or in a gunny sack in the Red River Valley,'' she said. 'So there's a difference, a cultural difference that I saw, which surprised me.'
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