Erika T. Wurth on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Intergenerational Trauma, and Heavy Metal

Novelist Erika T. Wurth joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the thousands of Indigenous women who go missing or are murdered in the U.S. every year. Wurth’s new literary-horror novel White Horse begins with the protagonist, a 35-year-old urban Native named Kari, receiving a bracelet that once belonged to her mother, who disappeared years ago. Wurth discusses what gets in the way of tracking the missing; how people talk about violence against Native women; intergenerational trauma; the real-life bracelet that led to the one in the book; why Kari loves Megadeth and Stephen King; and writing towards catharsis. She also reads from the opening of White Horse.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode: 

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Your novel features a 35-year-old urban Native, Kari, who’s contending with the long ago mysterious disappearance of her mother, and the book mentions the phrase “missing and murdered indigenous women,” MMIW for our listeners. We were talking a little bit earlier before you joined us about how bad a lot of the data is. Not just bad in that there’s a lot of missing people, but really bad records, which makes it hard to address the problem.

So for example, in 2016, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 Missing American Indian and Alaskan Native women and girls, but the DOJ’s missing persons database recorded 116. A gap of 5,600 people, which is appalling. And I’m curious to hear you talk a little bit about how complex history and jurisdiction related to American Indians in this country affects the tracking of this issue.

Erika T. Wurth: I’m also hoping the novel is a fun horror novel that has its jump scares and is joyful and fun to read. And there are lots of really funny parts in there, too. And I think the central issue there is more, to use a bigger phrase, intergenerational trauma. But yes, it does try to peripherally address that issue because I think there’s very little data on American Indians who are women, who are urban, because in the United States there’s a real resistance to seeing urban Indians as Indian at all. In Canada, there is a tracking system, there has been for decades, for urban Indians; it’s racist, it’s gross.

But for generations upon generations, even if people weren’t on the reserve, it would say things like Métis or breed. There is a secondary status, if you will, in Canada, there’s First Nations and then there’s people who are Métis, who in 1987, garnered a secondary federal status. We have nothing like that down here. The only equivalent we have is state-recognized tribes that may have tried to move to federally recognized. In America, I think because of anti-Black sentiment, census takers were told until even the 1960s that even if a person looked full-blooded—I don’t like that phrase—but if they looked completely Native, if they didn’t speak any English whatsoever, to mark them down as Black or white.

There were very, very rare circumstances in which that wasn’t the case. I think that that’s affected the data to this day. In addition to the fact that there are a lot of Black Natives, there are a lot of Latinx Natives, of which I’m technically both, and so is the main character, Kari. People just don’t see them as American Indians at all and that’s another problematic aspect in terms of getting the numbers right in the United States for MMIW.

Whitney Terrell: There’s a moment when your main character Kari is talking to a retired police detective, Fredrico, who’s himself Mexican. And he talks about Mexican women who were murdered in factories and how no one thinks of them as being Indian because they speak Spanish, right? And so we looked up some statistics in the Urban Indian Health Institute report from 2018. A Santa Fe police rep says, “[Many] Native Americans adopted Hispanic names during colonial times… Our crime systems are not flexible enough to pick out Native Americans from others in the system.” So how does that racial misclassification make it hard to track missing women?

ETW: Yeah, I think every single country, Canada, the United States, and Mexico, all have different ways in which colonization and genocide occurred. And I think that, in Mexico, I always forget it in Spanish, but there’s an expression, and it’s something like, “uplifting the race.” It means that, okay, we’re not going to kill you off in the same proportions, but we’re going to assimilate you and make you feel that marrying up or marrying a white person is better; ultimately, we can breed you out, culturally.

And then racially, the problem really becomes the issue of who you are. So in the United States, a lot of Native people are like, “Race isn’t real. Blood quantum is gross.” And it’s much much better to look at issues such as citizenship. Do you belong to a federally recognized nation? And I like that idea. I think in some ways, it takes on all the bad stuff. But it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re like me, and you’re not a member of a federally recognized tribe, but I have, and so has my family, kept up our connection to urban Indian culture, which is something that arose in different places in the United States, as colonization occurs, Chicago, Minneapolis, Winnipeg. I’m still connected to these urban Indian cultures that are authentic and real.

I think in Mexico, the problem became—except for very isolated communities—everybody is mestizo to some degree or another, but they were encouraged not to speak their language—that happened here, too—and not to think of themselves as Native American. So a lot of people who are Mexican, or of Mexican descent are like “Mexican is not a race. Mexican is a nationality. It’s not an ethnicity. We identify now as Native American.” But of course, then they have to figure out what that means, literally what tribe they are, or what tribes have been taken from them. So this is problematic in every single way.

VVG: Right, and one of the things that your book does so beautifully—in reading these reports, also, one of the things that emerges is that one of the problems with the way that we depict and cover stories related to Native Americans, of course has to do with the history of imagining your community as both in the past and in a rural space.

And so one of the great things about the novel is the way that it puts your character Kari, who is urban and is Native front and center, and she’s very alive and in the moment and as you mentioned, also very funny, despite the fact that this quest at the heart of the book starts with her thinking about her missing mom. She and her family have this history in urban spaces, including Kari’s mother, who was involved with AIM, the American Indian Movement, which started in Minneapolis, actually, though Kari’s mom was involved in Denver. And I wonder if for listeners who aren’t familiar with AIM, if you could talk a little bit about what that was.

ETW: Yeah, in my life, it’s always been in the periphery, but it’s in the periphery of every American Indian’s life, I think. So its biggest times were probably the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. And in Denver, the biggest figure is, like them or not, and I would understand why, Russell Means and Ward Churchill. They are of Native descent. And so people like to argue about whether he’s really Native or not, which isn’t interesting to me. What is more relevant is that Russell Means did not have the most amazing history when it came to women. And that is kind of what’s at the heart of the novel.

Selected Readings:

• Erika T. Wurth • White Horse • You Who Enter Here • A Thousand Horses Out to Sea • Buckskin Cocaine • Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend • Indian Trains • “14 Contemporary Books By Native American Writers To Get Excited About” • “Erika T. Wurth on Writing Horror During a Horror Renaissance,” CrimeReads

Others:

 • “Dave Mustaine lesson: Learn about exotic voicings, major and minor diads and ‘upside down’ chords” by Dave Mustaine • Native Hope • Department of Justice – Missing or Murdered Indigenous People • Russell Means • Ward Churchill • Stephen Graham Jones • Rebecca Roanhorse • Brandon Hobson • Kelli Jo Ford • V. Castro • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1 Episode 10: “Indigenous Imaginations: Native American Writers on Their Communities” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 9: “With the Ancestors: Buki Papillon on African Folklore and Wakanda Forever” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 8: “Live from Writers for Readers in Kansas City: Alexander Chee on Editing Best American Essays 2022” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5 Episode 8: “Paul Lisicky and Terese Marie Mailhot on the Long-Term Mental Health Effects of the Pandemic” • Talking Scared Podcast Episode 117: “Erika T. Wurth & Bigfoot in Your Dreams” • Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report • MMIWUSA.org • “A Crisis Ignored: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,” by Andrea Cipriano • Stephen King • Megadeth • Guns N’ Roses • Metallica