Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter
Mass
Murder in California’s Empty Quarter is a contemporary journalistic work about Cherie Rhoades, a
native woman who killed four and wounded two others in 2014 at the Northern
California Paiute’s Cedarville Rancheria offices in Alturas, California.
Rhoades is the second of only three women to commit mass murder in the United
States, and she is the only woman to be tried, convicted and given the death
sentence.
Deeper,
this is the story of a family of urban natives who took Bureau of Indian
Affairs federal funding and moved from the city to the reservation. The
displacement was a trial they were unprepared for. They met lineal ancestry requirements for tribal enrollment, but
they knew nothing of the Northern California Paiute’s cultural heritage,
traditions, spirituality, customs, language—and predictably they did not know
tribal laws that governed them.
The
dysfunction of the small tribe was so severe that it led to the four deaths and
two attempted murders. That is the story’s outline, but not its
boundaries. Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter details not only the killings, but
tribal treachery, the death penalty, rural racism in Northeastern California
and the ineptitude of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
