Marcie Rendon's long journey to award-winning novelist

Lara Annette trudged through knee-high snow to hear Marcie Rendon speak recently. She said she’s drawn to Rendon’s deep understanding of this part of state. 

“I absolutely love hearing characters and places and being able to envision roads in my mind that I've actually driven that the characters are driving on,” said Annette. “To know people that are like the characters, to feel that somebody actually understands Minnesota instead of making it into a caricature.” 

As an Indigenous woman, mother and former therapist, Rendon uses her experience and intimate knowledge of the state's backroads and byways to weave tales about the good, and the evils, that exist in rural America's seedy underbelly. 

“I try to never write anything that could be identifiable to anybody that I worked with. Because I don't want to violate anybody's confidence," Rendon said. “So anything that I've written is a really, really old story or it's a story that I totally made up.” 

Inspired in a graveyard

Like her earlier Cash Blackbear stories, her newest novel titled "Sinister Graves" is set in the 1970s. It begins with Blackbear's mentor asking her to help investigate after an Indigenous woman is found dead in the Red River during historic flooding.

Blackbear has a gift which allows her to see and hear things no one else can. The novel subtly peppers how Blackbear uses that gift into the story without it being distracting.

The inspiration for “Sinister Graves” came years ago while Rendon was traveling through Idaho with a friend. After stopping at an old rural church with no sign of life for miles around, she noticed the graveyard was separated into two sides. The graves on one side were all Native Americans and on the other all were non-Natives.

It was on that side of the graveyard she noticed a family plot where four young children had all died before their parents. Rendon’s friend reasoned the children died from the Spanish flu but the dates where wrong. 

Rendon’s mind began racing about what had happened to the dead children. She thought of an isolated mother struggling with postpartum depression or an abusive father. 

For her author’s note at the end of “Sinister Graves,” Rendon wrote, “And out there, in the middle of nowhere, no one would be around to question an accident happening here, and illness occurring there.”     

It's art imitating a life outsiders have a hard time believing is based in reality.

During the editing of her first novel "Murder on the Red River," she recalls how her editor scoffed at the idea that Blackbear never saw her mother or father again after being placed in foster care. 

"I said, 'What do you mean nobody's going to believe that? It happened all the time.' And she said, 'Well, what are you talking about?'” Rendon remembered.

“And so then I told her like that whole history of where in the 1950s and 1960s, 60 percent of the children from Red Lake were removed and placed in white foster homes and between 40 percent and 60 percent were removed from White Earth. You know, it was just common" she said. 

Like her character, Rendon spent time in foster care as a child. It's an experience she's reluctant to share. 

“That is a much less interesting story than my story as a writer," she said.

The long road to publication

Rendon was born in Norman County in Minnesota in 1952. A voracious reader as a young girl, eventually, she started writing poetry and stories of her own.  

In 1975, she graduated from what is now Minnesota State University Moorhead with degrees in criminal justice and Indian studies. Then, three years later, with one child and another on the way she left her rural home for a chance to improve her life. 

“I thought, ‘I need to get out,’ sometimes changing environments helps,” she said. "I went to Minneapolis and got a job at Heart of the Earth Survival School, I was just like, this is what I needed to do to maintain my sobriety and to put food on the table for my kids." 

While she laughs about it now, the move to the Twin Cities wasn't easy.

"I was one of the people that nobody thought would ever leave the rural area. I mean, they're like, 'You're going to the city?' Because I had never, it just wasn't me. And it was hard. It was a really, really hard adjustment," she said. 

A scene from "Sinister Graves" parallels this struggle. Overcome with emotion, Blackbear jumps into her Ranchero and speeds out of the city until about an hour later, the calm tranquility of the country brings her balance. 

Rendon said she’d “spend hours driving up and down the Mississippi crying, just wanting to be home." 

Eventually, she adjusted and worked in the mental health field for many years. But she kept writing, storing her work in a dresser drawer. 

When Rendon finally began submitting stories for publication, she says she was overwhelmed by the number of rejections she received.

One day while reading a Stephen King novel she began to cry. She recalls asking herself, “Marcie, what are you doing? This is crazy. This is like a horror story. There's nothing sad here. Why are you crying?”  

Finally, she realized it was because she would never be able to write like King. That led to an epiphany which in turn resulted in her becoming a published author.

"If you're going to be a writer, you have to write from your own authenticity,” Rendon said. “In your own story, your own words, your own, you know, flow." 

Getting to Oprah

One of Rendon’s many successes was being listed as one of the top 30 Native writers in the country by Oprah Magazine in 2020. She said that honor came about by chance. 

Rendon had a friend who was going to sing on Oprah Winfrey’s show, so she gave the friend one of her books and told her to give it to Winfrey to read. She said her friend couldn’t get close enough to Winfrey to present the book so she did the next best thing. 

“My friend gave the book to a cleaning lady and asked her to put it on Oprah's dressing table. And then a year later, Oprah came out with this list of top 30 Native writers and my name was there,” Rendon said. “That's the only way that I can imagine that she would have heard of me.”   

With the rise in popularity of shows and movies such as “Reservation Dogs,” “Rutherford Falls” and “Prey,” Rendon said Indigenous representation across all platforms matters because she grew up in a time when there wasn’t any. 

“My first two books were children's nonfiction. And what I really wanted was for children to see themselves as they are today. You know, like, we're alive, living, vibrant. But it's also important that non-Native people see us as existing, as real,” she said. “Representation says, we exist. And we exist fully as human beings in the present, in the here and now. And that's what I'm trying to do.” 

Rendon says she is not Cash Blackbear. While their similarities cannot be denied, Rendon said Blackbear’s story could be any Native woman’s.

For that reason, she is closely watching for the U.S. Supreme Court Decision on the Indian Child Welfare Act, worrying if it’s struck down, it will violate treaty rights and the sovereignty of Indigenous people. 

Making this even more of a reality for Rendon was the discovery of mass graves at Indigenous boarding schools throughout Canada right before the release of "Sinister Graves." It forced her to come to terms with many of the traumas Native people have been subjected to. 

“It was physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, just all, and it was intentional,” she said. “You know, the boarding schools didn't work. So, then it became the foster care system that just kind of ‘Let's destroy people destroy family, destroy tribe.’” 

However, Rendon says despite all that has happened over the years, she believes Indigenous people are more resilient than they are traumatized. 

• Ask a Bookseller: ‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason
• Vacant no more: Artists, creatives move into empty storefronts for new Minneapolis initiative
• ‘Meant to be’: Four years later, Black Garnet Books owner is selling, to a friend 
• Dr. Marty Makary on medicine's blind spots