Mask of the Deer Woman
“the story sheds light on the real-life disappearances and deaths of Indian women and girls that our society allows through apathy and inaction.”
The epidemic of murdered, kidnapped, and missing women from Indian reservations in our country underlies Mask of the Deer Woman, set on a fictional small Indian reservation in rural Oklahoma. Carrie Starr, a detective who left the Chicago Police Department under a cloud, finds work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs—owing to Indigenous blood on her father’s side—as the sole law enforcement officer assigned to the reservation.
She does not want to be there. She does not want to be anywhere, for that matter, traumatized as she is by the death of her teenage daughter, the story of which dribbles out through the length of the book. Starr knows nothing of her father’s people or heritage or culture, and does not feel welcome in the place he was raised but abandoned. “She still felt like an interloper. Not only because she was BIA sent, a reminder of the tribe’s contentious and traumatic dealings with the federal government, but because her father’s culture—his family—was so unfamiliar to her.”
Fueled by whiskey and weed (in seemingly unrealistic quantities and frequency to go undiscovered, even unnoticed), Starr investigates, reluctantly, the whereabouts of a young woman gone missing and the grisly murder of another. Her inquiries are complicated by lack of cooperation from the public, lack of facilities or support, and a touch of the supernatural in the form of the mythical Deer Woman. Woven throughout the fast-moving story, which takes place over a matter of days, is the further complication of proposals by an oil company, supported by officials and other non-Indians in a town bordering the reservation, to recover oil and gas under Indian land through fracking.
But the biggest barrier facing Starr lies within—discomfort with her mixed heritage, pain from the loss of her daughter and the resulting loss of her job, and her addictions. “It had been a colossal mistake to take this job, to try to keep hold of her career, but what were her choices?” she asks herself. And when her patrol vehicle is adulterated with graffiti, “The tagged door reflected how . . . everyone here saw her. As an outsider who didn’t belong. But to her mother’s family she had been too Native. She wasn’t enough for anyone.”
The job itself would seem overwhelming to a sober investigator, let alone one hobbled by a steady diet of alcohol and marijuana. “What did the BIA think she was really going to accomplish out here? It was like they tried to make it easy for bad guys. Tried. It was entirely possible for a killer to make a go of it on the rez virtually undetected,” she realizes. And, “Starr looked at the BIA boxes filled with the names of missing women, murdered women, lost girls. Little paper coffins all their own.”
At the violent, climactic scene in the back country of the reservation, readers will wonder if Starr is up to the job when tendrils of the investigation and a number of crimes coalesce. “She kept her eyes upward as much as she could, but the lingering effects of so much weed and whiskey made her slow, lent soft edges to her perception . . .”
The cast of characters includes a forceful mother who pushes Starr to find her missing daughter, a reclusive suspect she learns was a boyhood friend of her father, a conniving mayor, a scheming city manager, a greedy landowner, a plotting tribal leader, and a young police officer lent to her investigation by the neighboring town’s mayor. The story pings from one relationship and storyline to another, sometimes so quickly it can be hard to follow.
While Carrie Starr can be hard to like, readers will root for her to fend off her demons and accomplish her work if only because the story sheds light on the real-life disappearances and deaths of Indian women and girls that our society allows through apathy and inaction.