Marcie Rendon is an award-winning Minnesota author and enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. She's had a prolific writing career as a freelance writer, playwright, poet, children's book author and novelist, as well as a community arts and social activist.
Herself a longtime fan of crime novels, Marcie has thrilled readers with her Cash Blackbear murder mystery series starting in 2017 with Murder on the Red River. A fourth book in that series is set to be released in the spring of 2025.
Marcie’s newest book is a stand-alone novel called Where They Last Saw Her. This compelling mystery/thriller introduces us to Quill, a woman living on the Red Pine Reservation in Minnesota whose life revolves around her husband and children, her friends, and training for the Boston Marathon. But a series of missing women in the community finds Quill struggling between protecting her family and stepping up and fighting for justice for these women.
Running is a notable theme in the story, and in a recent What We’re Reading interview Marcie explained, “I think so many times we’re stereotyped as we just go to powwows or we cook fry bread…But I really wanted the women in this story to represent something else and Quill as a runner--she's determined, she's got goals.”
Where They Last Saw Her brings to the forefront the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), something Marcie has been writing about for almost 10 years. She recalled that the first time she wrote a short story about MMIW, her editor didn’t know to what she was referring. Marcie said, “It was clear that those of us in Indian country--for us it's an everyday, ongoing issue, but the rest of the world…lots of people don't even think we exist anymore. And so how can we be missing if we never existed?”
Marcie noted some recent Minnesota legislation to study and address the crisis. She explained, “The state created a task force to look at the issue and then here in Minneapolis, a group of people from Little Earth housing projects…formed a group of indigenous protectors. When somebody does go missing…there's people who are prepared to start looking, to put out flyers, to have an organized effort.”
Central to Where They Last Saw Her is Quill’s community of relatives and friends, including her close friends Punk and Gaylyn. Marcie noted, “Our communities are small. We have to rely on each other. There's a bond that comes from having the same community, the same story, the same history. Oftentimes you go to ceremony, you go to powwows, you go to a community event and it's a family that shows up: a mom, her daughter and her granddaughter. Or it's a group of women who've been friends since grade school. Because they're all from the same community, and so their relationship [in the book] mirrors what I see in our communities.”
· Marcie Rendon's website
· MMIW Minnesota Task Force
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