Broken Fields by Marcie R. Rendon
Author and community activist Marcie R. Rendon has been involved in the theater arts for longer than she has been a novelist and now can’t write fast enough to satisfy readers of her compelling crime fiction. This reviewer read her first three “Cash Blackbear” thrillers in two weeks and became an instant evangelist for her work. Broken Fields is the fourth book in this series set in the Red River Valley between Minnesota and North Dakota in the early 1970’s featuring protagonist/ narrator Renee “Cash” Blackbear. While the series is progressive, each book can be savored as a standalone novel.
Our heroine is a whip-smart young Ojibwe woman who works as a laborer driving trucks and farm equipment in summer and during breaks from her criminology studies at Moorhead State College. She also hustles pool in local bars and occasionally enters tournaments with a partner to fund her fondness for beer and cigarettes as well as supplement her meager income. Cash grew up fast becoming tough and cynical in a foster care system that failed to protect her from physical and verbal abuse. From early childhood, she was compelled to work as an unpaid maid, cook, child minder and farm hand for the stream of white foster families who used her, then returned her to the same indifferent social worker. At age 11, she began smoking and excessively drinking beer to minimize the trauma.
An Unflinching Portrait of Life in the Foster System
Despite the compensation they received from the state for her care, the majority of the families withheld this support from their charge. Cash was accustomed to wearing charity cast-offs and was nearly always hungry as the farmer’s wives routinely skimped on her meals usually served separately from the family’s dinner table. They did have to comply with sending her to school where she found brief respite in her studies and library books. Malnutrition may have contributed to her petite stature as the now young adult is only 5’2” tall and might weight 100 pounds fully dressed including her work boots. Her hair is worn in a single long braid down her back or tucked under a cap with denim or flannel shirts and jeans her typical garb.
As she grew older, she became adept at self-defense to deflect sexual assault from heads of households or their sons. Cash had long ago abandoned any hope of rescue from this cycle of abuse. Her father was unknown and she hasn’t seen her mother or sister since mom got drunk, rolled the car with her three children in it who were then taken from her. It has been sixteen years since she had seen her long-lost brother Mo. He is a Vietnam Veteran who briefly returned in Book 2, Girl Gone Missing, but soon re-enlisted for a second term feeling uncomfortable “on the outside”. He didn’t have any information about their mother or baby sister ChiChi whom he had also not seen since the accident. No effort had been made to keep the siblings together.
Her one true friend and guardian Sheriff Wheaton had ensured at bare minimum that the various foster parents kept her in school. His interest in her welfare began when he pulled the three year-old little girl out of the wreckage of her mother’s car. He, too, is Ojibwe, and also had been a ward of the state. After years of back-breaking work for his farm family guardians who promised him a permanent home and a share in their prosperity, when he turned 18 they cast him out as if he were a stranger begging at the back door. Leaving with an education of bitter memories and an old pick-up truck, he joined the US Army, fought in the Korean War, and entered law enforcement after an honorable discharge.
A Relentless Pursuit of Justice
Native American women and children are especially vulnerable to oppression, exploitation and bodily harm with a disproportionately high rate death rate from murders that largely remain unsolved. Sheriff Wheaton confronts the harrowing history his people have faced and works diligently to solve crimes in the widespread White Earth Nation which extends across two states and into Canada. He has watched over Cash in the years she was bounced like a ping pong ball from family to family. When she turned 18 and was peremptorily ousted from state care, he co-signed for a small apartment for her in Fargo and encouraged her to pursue a college education.
Cash Blackbear has assisted Sheriff Wheaton with criminal investigations in a number of troubling cases involving murdered Native Americans. She possesses a curious strong psychic ability to pick up clues and directions from crime scenes which manifest in dreams or waking visions that guide her to search for solutions. Facing dangerous situations, the pair have solved brutal murders, uncovered a sex-trafficking ring after several college coeds vanished from campus, and exposed a series of baby kidnappings and murders.
The current mystery Broken Fields may keep you up late, compulsively reading to the final page. While preparing a field for spring planting, Cash discovers the body of a well-liked farm owner lying on the floor in the kitchen of his tenant farmer. A few days later, the Native American laborer’s body is found partially buried in an animal pen. His wife was missing from the original crime scene, but their traumatized five-year-old daughter Shawnee was discovered cowering under a bed in the home. She may have witnessed the killings,, but the fright has left her mute. Cash is determined to locate the mother and reunite her with her child before she is placed into foster care. It’s an exciting drama with multiple crimes including a bank robbery and a cold case, resulting in both Cash and Sheriff Wheaton facing mortal danger.
Before the Indian Child Welfare Act There Was Only Survival
As Cash enters her 20s, she has become more confident of her intellectual gifts, advancing in her studies rapidly as she tests out in lieu of taking a basic required course or more each semester. Through fellow students, she is gradually learning about the Women’s Liberation Movement. While playing pool, Cash has acquired a strikingly handsome and slightly older tentative boyfriend she calls “Long Braids”. He is involved in the American Indian Movement (AIM), a grassroots movement founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1968 to address a myriad of issues including poverty, discrimination and police brutality.
Cash Blackbear, Sheriff Wheaton and countless other Native Americans were born too soon to benefit from the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 which is a United States federal law that “grants exclusive jurisdiction to Indian tribes over custody proceedings involving an Indian child who resides within the reservation of such tribe or is a ward of a tribal court” with the aim of providing greater safeguards for native children.
Marcie R. Rendon was the 2020 recipient of Minnesota’s Distinguished Artist Award and the first Native American woman to receive this prestigious honor which “recognizes artists who have chosen to make their lives and careers in Minnesota, thereby making the state a more culturally rich place.” She is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother which she credits as being among the reasons she chooses to write about their shared Ojibwe heritage. Marcie is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation located in NW Minnesota, the largest of the seven reservations located in the state.
White Earth Reservation was created by a treaty between the United States and the Mississippi Band of Chippewa Indians in 1867. They are dedicated to preserving traditions, language and culture while addressing issues that continue to face the Anishinaabe, “the original people” called Ojibwe by first European explorers and settlers. Canadian tribal members continue to use this name while many in the United States prefer Chippewa. Her articulate, gripping thrillers may be compared favorably with works by Ramona Emerson, Margaret Coel, Tony Hillerman and his daughter Anne Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, and Aimée Thurlo among others.
About Marcie R. Rendon:
Marcie R. Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, author, playwright, poet, and freelance writer. Also a community arts activist, Rendon supports other native artists / writers / creators to pursue their art, and is a speaker for colleges and community groups on Native issues, leadership, writing.
She is an award-winning author of a fresh new murder mystery series, and also has an extensive body of fiction and nonfiction works.
The creative mind behind Raving Native Theater, Rendon has also curated community created performances such as Art Is… Creative Native Resilience, featuring three Anishinaabe performance artists, which premiered on TPT (Twin Cities Public Television), June 2019.
Rendon was recognized as a 50 over 50 Change-maker by MN AARP and POLLEN in 2018. Rendon and Diego Vazquez received a 2017 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with women incarcerated in county jails.
