Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle via MPR News.
Among her many accomplishments, Twin Cities-based author Marcie Rendon writes a mystery series about indigenous investigator Cash Blackbear.
I read a lot of mysteries, and I gravitate toward those about different cultures, often outside North America. But indigenous cultures here are equally foreign to me, which is why I have enjoyed Marcie Rendon’s Cash Blackbear series, about a tough young Ojibwe woman who investigates crimes against members of Upper Midwest tribes, often women.
I have several articles here for you to click on if interested, but I’m going to focus on what the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation said about Rendon when they gave her an award.
“The McKnight Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of Marcie Rendon for its 2020 Distinguished Artist Award—a $50,000 award created to honor a Minnesota artist who has made significant contributions to the state’s cultural life. Rendon, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, is a writer whose poems, plays, children’s books, and novels explore the resilience and brilliance of Native peoples.
“ ‘Marcie brings a strong and necessary voice to so many genres,’ said Pamela Wheelock, McKnight’s interim president. ‘She has created a tremendous body of work, including poetry, plays, lyrics, and award-winning crime novels, all while raising up other Native voices in our community. Her commitment to making art in community embodies what a distinguished artist means to Minnesota and to McKnight.’ …
“A gifted storyteller and prolific writer, Rendon is the author of the award-winning Cash Blackbear mystery series, set in Minnesota’s Red River Valley. The first novel in the series, Murder on the Red River, earned the 2018 Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel, and the second, Girl Gone Missing, was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America – G. P. Putnam’s Son’s Sue Grafton Memorial Award. Rendon … is also the author of four nonfiction children’s books, including Powwow Summer (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013).
“Rendon’s plays include Sweet Revenge, chosen for the Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company’s 2020 New Native American Play Festival. She has also curated and produced a variety of Native-focused performances at the History Theatre, the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and Patrick’s Cabaret. She is the founder of Raving Native Theater, a platform that brings voice and visibility to other Native American artists and performers.
“ ‘We are more resilient than we are traumatized,’ said Rendon. ‘Art keeps us thriving, not just surviving. I try to make room for other Native artists. Every time someone steps forward, it makes room for others to step forward.’ …
“Rendon’s poem ‘Resilience’ is also included in US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s digital project ‘Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry,’ which will join the permanent collection of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
“Rendon’s awards include a 2020 Ensemble/Playwright Collaboration Grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters and the Playwrights’ Center, and a 2020 Covid-19 artist grant from the Tiwahe Foundation for demonstrating resilience during the pandemic. Rendon was named a 2018 50 Over 50 honoree by AARP Minnesota and Pollen Midwest and received Loft’s 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship with poet Diego Vazquez. …
“Said Sandy Agustin, a member of the Distinguished Artist Award selection committee, ‘Whether she is writing about boarding schools, incarceration, or the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, she is nurturing Native voices and amplifying communities that are too often unheard, especially Native women.’
“Born in northern Minnesota in 1952, Rendon was a voracious reader, creative writer, and poet from an early age. While studying criminal justice at Moorhead State College in the early 1970s, she was part of a group of Native student activists who successfully demanded the launch of the university’s first American Indian studies department.
“After moving to the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis in the late 1970s, she worked as a counselor and therapist, while raising her three daughters. In 1991 she saw a performance by Margo Kane, a Cree-Saulteaux artist, that inspired Rendon to share her own poetry and writing with a wider audience. …
“She is currently collaborating with artist Heather Friedli on an upcoming installation at the Weisman Art Museum about the high rates of incarceration among Native women.”
I have read most of the Cash Blackbear books (there’s a new one just out), and I find the urgent educational energy of the series both its strength and its weakness. Rendon feels empowered by a need to educate unenlightened readers like me, and I appreciate what she’s doing. After all, injustices continue and indigenous women in particular still disappear at an intolerable rate. I’ll just say that sometimes the mission overwhelms a good yarn.
More at the McKnight Foundation, here. See also Minnesota Public Radio, here, and Visual Collaborative, here.
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