has away of exploring issues, putting flesh on bones, as it were, to tell stories about people that can educate, inform, and sometimes inspire and even anger.

Today's guest uses that art form to shine a light on the challenges facing Native communities and Native women in particular.

She's Vanessa Lillie, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (music calms) (music fades) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University - And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is bestselling author Vanessa Lillie, whose new novel "Blood Sisters" is out now.

Vanessa, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you guys for having me, it's an honor.

- So congratulations about "Blood Sisters."

We wanna talk to you about it, we wanna talk to you about the issues that it raises.

Why don't you give us a quick overview of the book itself, though?

- Sure.

"Blood Sisters" is about Syd Walker.

She's an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and she lives in Rhode Island, but she's called back to her Northeastern Oklahoma hometown after some remains are found and her sister goes missing.

And Syd's determined to make sure that her sister is not another Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women statistic, so she plunges herself into the dark and seedy side of Northeastern Oklahoma, which is also where I'm from.

- I was gonna ask you about that.

So you revisited your hometown, that part of Oklahoma in researching and writing this book.

How much has it changed since you were a kid?

- So, that's such a great question, because it's very interesting to return to the place where you were raised, but as an adult.

And I have a child, so I was looking at it as a parent, I was looking at it as a writer and a researcher.

And Northeastern Oklahoma is unique and for me was kind of the perfect setting for this story because there is a big environmental injustice piece from where I'm from.

The mining companies came in in the early 1900s, took resources and minerals out of the land and then abandoned it, and it has since become one of the most toxic places in America.

And so I grew up with that.

In fact, the river next to my house would often run orange when the creeks would flood.

It's something that I studied in high school as part of environmental projects, wrote research papers about it in college.

So I have followed it through my life, but I hadn't really gone back to think about the kind of human side, and that's what I tried to write about in "Blood Sisters."

- So your Native American heritage influenced this deeply.

Tell us about when you decided you wanted to write this novel and bring that part of your personality and your background into a book.

'Cause you've written other bestsellers, but not with this type of a theme.

- Yes, I knew I wanted to write about being Cherokee, but I also wanted to write about it in the right way and the right context.

My two other books are set in Providence.

And I felt like to really do my story justice, and the story of Syd Walker, in fact, Walker is my family's last name of the member who was on the Trail of Tears.

So it was sort of personal for me and I wanted to bring our history into it.

So I felt like with "Blood Sisters," setting it in Oklahoma, that was the right place and the right setting.

And, you know, particularly, so much of Indigenous history in America is about erasure, and I felt like by talking about my real family, our real history, why we are in Northeastern Oklahoma, even in a fictional setting, it sort of fought against that kind of erasure.

- So we're gonna get into the Trail of Tears a little bit further into the show, and erasure also.

Bring us to the beginning of the novel.

You've already mentioned the protagonist, Syd Walker.

She's in Rhode Island.

She gets called back to Oklahoma, Miami.

- Miami, very good!

- Miami.

(Jim and G. laughing) - Yes, it's spelled like Miami, but we'll know- - We've been practicing.

- Good!

It's very important.

- She's called back there.

- Mm-hmm.

- What happened?

Something terrible happened in her background.

- Right.

Syd survived a very violent home invasion crime, and the story actually opens almost like a flashback to that moment when she was 15 years old.

She was able to save her sister, but her best friend Luna and Luna's parents were murdered that night.

And so that home invasion crime kind of opens the story, and Syd, my main character, has lived with that trauma her whole life.

And so when she's called back to Northeastern Oklahoma, she's, in a way, not only there's some remains found that could be tied to that crime, but also I think for her it's to really deal with the trauma for the first time in her life and kind of reconcile what happened that night.

You know, if you study trauma research, so much of it lives in our body and it lives even maybe in our DNA carried down through ancestors.

And so trauma- - Absolutely, yeah.

- Trauma was a big part of what I wanted to explore with her character, not only from that violent night, but even through the trauma of the Trail of Rears, the relocation, you know, just depending on how far back you go.

And the home invasion piece we were speaking earlier was, you know, based on a real crime that happened in my community, and the family has still not found the remains of those girls.

And so it was very personal, but the hope was that by kind of elevating it in that way, that it could, you know, bring awareness to the pretty serious issues.

- And that scene, by the way, is so gripping.

It's violent, but it's gripping.

I mean, you cannot let go of it.

And that's true of all your writing, you know, and true in this work right through to the very end.

I mean, it's just you're brought there.

Sometimes you don't want to be there, but you have to be there and you can't get away from there.

- Yeah.

I think I'm a pretty impatient reader, so as a writer I really push myself.

And thank you for saying that.

I push myself to try to make it a page-turner, because as much as the history and even the personal pieces are important, at the end of the day, I have a job to do and that's be a thriller writer and to entertain and make sure people are compelled by the mystery and turning the pages.

- Well, entertain, and this case, educate too, clearly.

- [Vanessa] Yeah.

- And I can say, just from my own experience, I tore through this book.

It is a page-turner.

- Good.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- I wanna talk a little bit, though, more about Syd, because she's really an intriguing character.

When you write, how do you conjure these characters in the first place?

- I think voice is a big part of it.

I kind of hear a voice of a character.

It often takes writing a whole draft before I've developed that voice.

I mean, for Syd, there were a few things that were important to me.

I wanted her to have my background.

I wanted her to be white-presenting Cherokee, to be from Northeastern Oklahoma.

I also wanted to give her a pursuit of justice at any cost.

I feel like maybe, fill us as a reader too, when a character is really driven, to me, that's the most compelling experience.

So I knew I wanted her to really believe in justice.

And archeology came together actually through research.

I was connected to an archeologist through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and she told me about her view of archeology was that, you know, she works with tribes to sort of preserve the past, but support the future and look at what's valuable to them.

And so to me, archeology was just a really interesting job to give her and something I was excited to research and explore.

- So we were talking about violence, and violence has been the story of Native Peoples on this continent since the arrival of Europeans.

Give us an overview of that, I mean, the way Native Indigenous people have been treated.

- Yeah, I mean- - It's violence.

- Absolutely.

- And more, of course, but talk about the violence part, and then you can tell us about the Trail of Tears.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, I mean, you know, filming here in Rhode Island, we're in the heart of colonialism, right?

And from those earliest days of when explorers came here, it's interesting, I've been reading a lot about this for the sequel to "Blood Sisters," and, you know, it wasn't as simple as explorers arrived and began to slaughter Native Americans.

That actually isn't exactly what happened.

There was a lot of diplomacy that happened originally, but then land became more valuable, deals that had been struck, they went against them, and there became a demonizing of Native Americans in order to justify colonial actions of taking land and resources.

And I mean, here in Rhode Island you saw something like the Great Swamp Massacre, for example - The most violent act on Rhode Island soil in the history of the state.

- That's right.

And every tribe has a story or many stories like that.

For example, the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee people, I mean, that was essentially Andrew Jackson going against the Supreme Court ruling that he couldn't take the land, but he did it anyway.

And my family was outside of basically Nashville.

We were removed to camps, almost like cattle, and then marched across the country to Oklahoma.

And there were many Trail of Tears, and that's not a unique story to the Cherokee.

Many tribes had similar stories of their land being taken, stolen, and then being relocated and even relocated again.

The Quapaw Tribe, which is the tribe whose land was taken in this book, their land was taken twice.

They were moved from Arkansas and then they were moved again to Northeastern Oklahoma.

So here were many Trail of Tears in Indigenous history.

- Wow.

Another type of displacement, and this continued until relatively recently, were Indian boarding schools.

- [Vanessa] Oh, yes.

- And the motto was, I can't even say this, but I have to say this, "Kill the Indian and save the child."

And again, these were schools across the country where young Native children were sent to have their ancestry, their heritage essentially erased.

Talk about that.

And again, these continued until relatively recently.

This wasn't like 300 years ago and then they stopped 200 years ago.

- There are living survivors of the boarding schools right now, and they were certainly in America as well as extensively Canada.

You maybe have heard about people finding children's remains on these boarding schools.

- [G.] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Recently, right?

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- And I mean, again, it goes back to erasure.

When you're trying to steal land, steal resources, and dominate a culture, you have to remove the culture.

And Indigenous people fought back for hundreds of years and really continue to.

We are still here.

But the boarding schools in particular, you know, they were trying to take away that Native identity.

And it wasn't just that children were sent there; they were often stolen from homes.

I mean, there are stories of whole towns and villages being attacked and burned because they wouldn't send their children to these boarding schools.

And so it's something we're just now, kind of truth and reconciliation is a term often used with the boarding school process, and "The New York Times" had a huge piece recently about the boarding schools.

So it's something that's being talked about more and being shared more, but I think we have a lot to reconcile with what has been done.

- And you've mentioned talked about and shared.

What about education in schools?

A lot of this is still not taught in many schools.

- In many schools.

- [G.] I mean all across the country.

- Absolutely.

- Not just in Oklahoma or Tennessee.

- Right.

I was emailing, a reader had emailed me recently actually just saying, "Did you take Oklahoma history?"

And I was like, "I did, but I hardly remember any narratives around the tribes themselves."

It's actually much more about, like, the land run and this sort of myth around the frontier and this idea of coming out in wagons.

- The covered wagons, yeah.

- And there'd just be empty land and, you know, like "Far and Away" with Tom Cruise or something.

Like these, you know, sort of ridiculous ideas of what was here.

And I think we are just at the very beginning of trying to tell the truth, and I think that's maybe where some of the healing could come.

But it's very early and there's still, I mean, all the time I'm getting emails from readers saying, "I had no idea about this.

I had heard of the Trail of Tears, I didn't know what it meant."

And, "Can you recommend other Indigenous authors," which I love too.

So we are elevating more voices so we can get the history out there.

- And this book is part of the cause, clearly, if you're hearing this reaction from readers.

- The book shines a light as well on some really contemporary challenges facing Native communities as well.

Violence directed towards Native women, drug abuse and opioid addiction, among others.

Talk us through a little bit about that reality today.

- Absolutely.

So the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, we finally started getting a language around it recently, but it's been ongoing.

In fact, there's sort of this saying that actually Pocahontas was the first missing and murdered Indigenous woman.

She was stolen from her family and forced to go to England.

So it's not a new story, but it is a story that we have language around.

And thankfully, with social media, when someone does go missing, we're able to share information very quickly.

But the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, the challenge is that it is so different in so many communities, right?

It's not a monolith.

It's not just one simple problem you can clearly solve.

It's maybe the man camps out in Western America where it's easy to steal women in reservations nearby.

But then maybe, you know, it's a challenge on Cape Cod where a woman goes missing near reservation land and who has jurisdiction.

So there can often be an FBI, a BIA, local police challenges.

So it's a complicated topic, but thankfully, we are discussing it more.

I mean, you know, something like 85% of Native American women face violence in their lifetime.

It's much, much higher statistically.

So, we're seeing that there's a problem, and I think, you know, through books and social media and movies and things we're talking about more.

But again, I feel like we're at the very early days of really expressing the dangers and the action that we need to take.

- The other I thought interesting subtext throughout this is the fraught relationship between Native populations and the federal government.

So Syd works, she's an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which itself has not a great history.

- [Vanessa] No.

- What's the reality of that relationship today?

- Yeah, so for me, I thought, as a writer, it's really interesting to put your characters in a difficult position.

So I like this idea of her working for the BIA, which has a very fraught and challenging past with tribes, but also for her to want to do good because she does have access to resources and, you know, the government does do a lot of good, I have family members who actually worked for the BIA, and so I do know and see the good that they do.

But to this day, there's a lot of distrust in tribal communities for very good reason.

And so from a writer perspective, it felt like territory that would be great to read about and also just to create a character with a lot of complexity.

- Talk about another issue that you bring into this book, and that's other disparities between Native people and non-native people in this country.

And those include economic, educational, health and healthcare.

And I think during COVID we really saw that, you know, in a glaring light.

I did some writing about that and did a lot of reading about that.

Talk about those disparities too.

They persist and they're real and they're deep.

And then what might be done about them.

That's a whole separate show, I realize.

- Yeah.

There is this question around what is economic opportunity, right?

What is it that helps transform communities?

And you know, it's good school systems, supportive school systems where kids are encouraged to go to college, right?

Or encouraged to go to a great trade school.

It's having a system in place that is supporting the community kind of rising up.

And I think what we often find is that the system itself was built to do the opposite.

And so when we look at different Indigenous communities, I think the question is how are the schools, is there economic opportunity, legislatively are we supporting them?

I mean, even in Rhode Island's history, there's been questions around, like, the Narragansett Casino for example, or the smoke shop.

Those are the things I'm researching right now for my sequel.

- The smoke shop raid- - The smoke shop raid, right?

- Which was another act of violence, yeah.

- That's another act of violence against that community.

And the essence of those things are actually economic opportunity, whether or not you agree with smoking taxes or casinos.

We have seen in Indigenous communities that casinos do provide a lot of income to the tribes, in which suddenly they have the ability to, you know, build schools, build hospitals.

In Northeastern Oklahoma, actually there's a lot of casinos bringing in that money to the tribes, give them more power, right?

And that, again, goes against the system that is in place.

And so I think there's some questions around what economic opportunities are we giving to Native communities that extend, not only to Wi-Fi and clean water, which are also important, but also, you know, college education and things that create real generational wealth and opportunity.

- So, there's so much going on in this book, but one of the evolutions I thought was sort of the transformation that takes place in Syd about her relationship with her family, but also her relationship with where she's from.

And it almost seems you're extolling the virtues of the small town.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, so I'm from a small town and I left it when I was 18 to go to college and I return all the time to where I'm from, my parents still live there.

And I think it's difficult to leave any place.

In some ways you create a boundary, whether it's emotional or geographic.

And I wanted to create in Syd that kind of a complexity where she needed to leave, but you do feel bittersweet about it.

And she had, you know, parents who tried hard and I think did right by her for the most part, but it doesn't mean that it's just perfect.

And so I wanted her to be able to return home and have a lot of those feelings that maybe people have also experienced, which is you come home and it's a mixed feeling.

It's both positive and negative.

And I think that she's the kind of character that can kind of hold both of those things.

Actually, it was just on a book group last night with Tomaquag Museum actually, and one of- - Which is a great local Rhode Island Native history museum, yeah.

- That's headed by Loren Spears, who we've had on our show, actually one of the very first guests.

- Oh, I love that.

Yes.

So they were reading "Blood Sisters" last night and a woman actually commented exactly that.

She said, "You know, I'm from a small town in Kansas, And I really resonated with Syd having trouble going back to where she's from, but also feeling bad about never going back."

And that's something I kind of wanted to write about personally, and I was glad to see people connecting with that.

- So before we began taping, we were talking about my favorite author, Stephen King, and Margaret Atwood actually had an op-ed piece in today's "New York Times" on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Carrie."

Ghosts are big, obviously, in Stephen King's work.

And there's a great ghost in "Blood Sisters," Ghost Luna.

It's almost the alter ego of Syd, but it's not really clear.

Talk about Ghost Luna and talk about ghosts in general, 'cause this is not the first book you've had a ghost in.

- Yeah.

I like ghosts as kind of an echo of our subconscious, but I also like ghosts, and I don't know, maybe they're real.

And I think in, you know, Indigenous history and a lot of our stories, ghosts are prominent parts.

Spirituality is much more real and tangible than maybe it is kind of in traditional Western views.

So having a ghost in a book to me felt right.

And Ghost Luna is really a way for my main character to remember her friend who has passed.

The ghost is her friend stuck as a 15-year-old girl and she revisits her and teases her, and it's also a little humor and lightness in a heavy subject.

So I created her as a way for us to maybe get to know Syd a little better, but also to kind of think about, again, how does trauma manifest itself?

And so for me it was this outward representation of the trauma that she really carries with her since it happened.

- Talk about the title.

Near the end of the book, the very end of the book.

One of the characters says, quote, "We are blood sisters.

That's a bond that lasts a whole lifetime."

Blood sisters do not have to be relatives, correct?

Talk about blood sisters and why you used that title.

I mean, it talks about kinship, friendship, but more as well, I think.

- Yeah.

For me, blood sisters, I mean, I love this idea.

You hear blood brothers, right?

But for blood sisters, this idea that you cut yourself and you press your fingers together and then you're bonded for all of your life.

But even just the term sisters connects to the relationship of the kind of three women at the heart of the story.

And then there's also, like, a three sisters garden, which is something often done in Indigenous communities.

So sisterhood is a big theme, and so for me, I felt like blood sisters was a way to kind of tie all of that together, and that whether by blood or by choice, you can be connected in that kind of a sisterhood.

- So you write thrillers.

I'm sorry.

- No, go ahead, go ahead.

- Yeah.

You write thrillers.

- Yes.

- I'm curious though, we've had a lot of different writers on, and one of the things that always sort of fascinates me is the use of empathy.

And how do you use empathy?

I told you that there was a particular scene, we're not gonna give anything away, where I got a little misty, right?

- And I know the scene you mean, that happened to me too.

- How do you use empathy as an author, particularly in this genre?

- I think it's so important, because, you know, I often hear like, why thrillers?

And for me, a thriller is really about social justice and it's really about probably the most intense moment in a person's life, maybe murder, kidnapped child, something really shocking.

And so you see all the structures, all the relationships around them pulled tight, and you see where there is justice and injustice.

And I think that does bring in empathy.

It brings in, sort of the stakes, really, 'cause it's about emotion and it's about stakes and what could happen.

And maybe it's worst case scenario, maybe it's best case scenario.

And so as a writer, you push it as far as you need to, but it has to always be grounded in the character and their experiences.

And to me, emotion is a big part of a thriller.

- So in creating a character like Syd or Ghost Luna or any of the other characters that we may come across in the book, are you thinking about, are they likable?

Like, are they gonna resonate on some level with the reader, or?

- That's a great question.

Likability is a huge topic, I think, in writing right now, especially around women characters.

Like is the woman likable, which they don't always ask that about male characters.

Like, you know, is Jason Bourne likable?

(chuckles) I mean, that kind of thing.

But I think for me, I'm much more interested in a character who is compelling.

In fact, I mean, Syd is a 30-year-old woman with a lot of trauma, and she makes some questionable choices.

So to some she might not be as likable.

But what matters is, do you want to see how the journey continues?

Do you want to see how it ends?

And so I'm much more interested in making her a compelling character as opposed to likable.

- And there are times when you need a character who is completely not likable.

And Pete, and we won't give more detail on Pete, but he is one of the most vile characters, with good reason, given this book.

- Is it more difficult, though, to write one or the other, like someone who's sort of like an anti-hero versus the hero?

- So villains I'm very careful with, or antagonists really, if you will, because you don't want it to be a caricature.

You don't want it to be ridiculous.

And also, I love the phrase the villain is the hero of their own story.

I think as a writer you need to remember that, because if they're just so cartoonishly bad, it's not interesting.

And so even with the worst of the bad guys in this story, you know, I did at least try to think about why they were making their choices.

And I ended up kind of writing a bad guy a little worse than I normally would.

I think I like more shades of gray.

But I think, again, the story is somewhat rooted in a real crime that happened and the people connected, the bad guys in that story did seem pretty awful to me, so I felt that it was rooted in kind of real life, that there really are bad people like that who do terrible things.

- So we're almost out of time, but very, very quickly, you were telling us you are working on a sequel to "Blood Sisters."

- Yes.

- What can you tell us about it?

- 30 seconds.

- 30 seconds.

- So the sequel is set here in Rhode Island, Narragansett land, and I'm trying to write a compelling story that kind of deals with modern colonialism.

And I'm researching the history of this land, of the people, but I'm also hopefully tying it into kind of what does it mean in our lives today.

And Syd is back, so.

(chuckles) - Syd is back.

- Oh, good.

- That's what we wanted to hear.

So we'll look forward to reading that.

But Vanessa Lillie, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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