Anishinaabe author Marcie Rendon previews latest book

CATHY WURZER: Hey, Cash Blackbear is back. Who is Cash Blackbear, you ask? She's the main character in the popular murder mysteries written by twin cities author Marcie Rendon. Marcie is an award-winning author of poetry, plays, and novels. And she is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. Producer Melissa Townsend is a fan of the series and she spoke with Marcie Rendon about the new release.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Thank you so much for being on Minnesota Now today.

MARCIE RENDON: Hi, good to be here. Thank you.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: So I have a total girl crush on Cash Blackbear. I feel like she's this boss lady who would never give me the time of day in real life. But in your books, I get to kind of hang out with her and she's kind of my friend. What's been the response to her? Do you hear that a lot?

MARCIE RENDON: I do hear that a lot. People love Cash Blackbear. Native women say that I've written their lives. Some Native women say, oh, I wish I could be like Cash or I wish I'd been like Cash in my younger years. And people respond to her as if she's a real person.

So people are concerned about the amount that she smokes cigarettes, even though it's 1970 and everybody smoked in 1970. People are concerned about her drinking at such a young age. She's 19. So people respond as if she's real and that somehow I have control over bettering her life somehow, I don't know.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Where does she come from? Who is she? Is she modeled off of someone or an amalgamation of people you know?

MARCIE RENDON: I think that she is, like you said, an amalgamation. She's just an embodiment of the majority of Native women that I've known my entire life-- her strength, her resiliency, her vulnerability, the things that she faces in life are very real things that most Native women have faced and experienced.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Give me an example.

MARCIE RENDON: So Cash Blackbear, 19, aged out of foster care. And again, this is early-1970s. And so she was in foster care during that time in history-- in real history. 60% of native children were removed from their homes on the Red Lake Reservation and placed in white foster homes.

On the White Earth Reservation, they estimate between 40 and 60% of the children were removed. And so it's a real common story. It's kind of like when you hear or you see the things on Facebook where it says, every Native person has been impacted by the boarding school era. It's reality about Native women's lives. That's what I'm writing about.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: The thing I also wanted to talk about with you was Cash's super power. Is that how you think about that?

MARCIE RENDON: I don't. I'm white earth Ojibwe. I'm writing from my perspective as an Ojibwe woman. And so I'm just writing what's my reality, our reality. And so her capacity to intuit things, her capacity to dream, her capacity to know and see things that other people-- this is what you're talking about, correct?

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Exactly. The superpower. She has sort of this extra sense.

MARCIE RENDON: Right. And I think that for many native people in my experience, this has not been educated out of us. I just had a conversation this morning with my granddaughter about her dreams last night, my dreams last night. And it seems to be the first thing that, at least the native people in my life, you wake up and you say, oh, this is what I dreamt, this is what I dreamt.

Some you got to remember, some you got to pay attention to. So it's a common situation, at least in my experience. It's not seen as a superpower. I do think that Western society kind of educates people's intuitive abilities out of them.

There's so much focus on your capacity to memorize and spit back out information that's put in rather than relying on your own intuition, your own feelings, your own analysis of what's going on or what you see going on in the world around you.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Mm-hmm. And she's so smart-- whip-smart.

MARCIE RENDON: I also see that as being true across Indian country, where the intelligence of who we are as a people exists and is real. And when you look at the Native people who are leading, whether it's Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, different lawyers, other writers-- the upsurge in what's happening like with Reservation Dogs, that series-- and the creative minds that are making art-- it's like that kind of intelligence hasn't been somehow tampered out of us in spite of all of the oppression that we've seen.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: How has it been to work with a character over, now this will be the third book that comes out tomorrow, Tuesday, how has that been? Are you running out of things to say? Are you running out of sort of new revelations?

MARCIE RENDON: I don't think so. I hope not. I certainly hope not. There are so many crimes that happen in the world. But when you live in rural America, there are so many actual crimes that have been committed that never really got solved because of the isolation.

And so writing crime kind of gives me an opportunity to look at some of this stuff and in my writing, create a resolution that works for me. It may not be the true resolution of factual history, but it's a resolution of these crimes that have happened that don't necessarily get solved.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this book is being used in some American Indian studies classes at the university level. Is that right?

MARCIE RENDON: Well, Murder on the Red River and Girl Gone Missing, the first two, are. Maybe Sinister Graves will be too.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: What do you want people to take away from the book and that kind of setting?

MARCIE RENDON: So, again, another surprise to me-- my intention in writing the first two books and writing the third book, as I'm working on the fourth, is what I want to be doing is writing good crime stories that people who read crime want to read, want to continue to read the next book. That's my goal as an author.

There is something about Cash and the history that's being explored in the backstory of the books and the story of Cash's life that college classes are finding worth studying. So I know one professor literally did what seemed to me a whole class on Cash's PTSD.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Wow.

MARCIE RENDON: Things that happened to her in foster care and how that's impacting her life in the present, within the series. And it never occurred to me while I was writing the book that Cash had PTSD. When this professor pointed it out to me, it was like, oh, yeah, she does.

And the backstory about the whole history of Indian kids being taken from families and put in foster care, that's historical fact-- the boarding school, people being taken in place in boarding schools. That's historical fact. Sinister Graves-- there's a murder and Cash is trying to help solve the murder, but then she finds these little graves outside of a church in northern Minnesota.

And this book was written before the graves were found outside of the boarding school up in British Columbia. So this book was written before that ever came out into the public. But it happened. And if a crime novel can help people begin to look at some of these really hard issues, that's good.

It wasn't my intention. I was just trying to write a good crime story. But I can see where it serves a very useful purpose, because people are able to read a novel and look at hard things that they may not be able to look at if they're being sort of forced to look at it.

MELISSA TOWNSEND: Yeah.

MARCIE RENDON: You know what I mean?

MELISSA TOWNSEND: I do. And the framing, I think, because Cash Blackbear is so smart and so, I don't know, I find her to be an incredibly hopeful person-- she doesn't run around going, I'm so hopeful-- but just her strength is hopeful, you know? Well, Marcie, thank you for talking to me and thank you for Cash Blackbear.

MARCIE RENDON: Thank you so much. And thank you to the readers who care about her and keep reading her. That's good. Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: That was producer Melissa Townsend talking with Marcie Rendon. Marcy is a writer and a member of the White Earth band of Ojibwe. Her third book in the Cash Blackbear series comes out tomorrow. It is called Sinister Graves. And you can reserve a copy right now.

You can also catch her live this weekend. She'll be part of Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Book Festival in St. Paul on October 15.