Mass Murder in California's Empty Quarter: A Tale of Tribal Treachery at the Cedarville Rancheria

by Ray A. March

Overview

Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter exposes a story of mass murder, a community’s racism, and tribal treachery in a small Paiute tribe. On February 20, 2014, an unseasonably warm winter day for the little agriculture town of Alturas, California, Cherie Rhoades walked into the Cedarville Rancheria’s Paiute tribal offices. In the space of nine minutes she killed four people and wounded two others using two 9mm semiautomatic handguns. In that time she slayed half of her immediate family and became only the second woman, and the first Native American woman, to commit mass murder in the United States.

Ray A. March threads the story through the afternoon of the murders and explores the complex circumstances that led to it, including conditions of extreme economic disparity, privations resulting from tribal disenrollment, ineptness at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and family dysfunction coupled with a possible undiagnosed mental illness.

This account of the tragic murders and the deplorable conditions leading up to them shed light on the formidable challenges Native Americans face in the twenty-first century as they strive to govern themselves under the guise of U.S.-sanctioned sovereignty.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496217561
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,072,187
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ray A. March is an independent journalist whose articles and essays have appeared in Time, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He is the author of several books, including Alabama Bound: Forty-Five Years inside a Prison System and A River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River (Nebraska, 2012).

 
 

Table of Contents

Author’s Note    
Prologue    
Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter    
Epilogue    
Acknowledgments    
Appendix    
Notes    
Bibliography    

Editorial Reviews

08/31/2020

March (River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River) details in this searing account the case of Cherie Rhoades, the first woman tried for mass murder in the United States. Rhoades, who met the legal requirements to be considered a Native American but was not raised as one, was 24 in 1969 when she and some relatives took up the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ invitation to move to Cedarville Rancheria in Northern California, a reservation for the Northern Paiutes, whose traditions they knew nothing about. Rhoades, who received free housing and a quarterly payment from the tribe’s casino profits, soon gained a reputation as a bully. She joined the Northern Paiute executive committee, from which she was kicked off after being accused of embezzling tribal funds. The tribe voted to evict her from her home, but, at the hearing on Feb. 19, 2014, Rhoades showed up with two pistols and opened fire, killing four people, three of them relatives. In 2017, she was found guilty of murder and attempted murder, and sentenced to death. After a moratorium on executions in 2019, she sits on death row today. This portrait of a flawed woman driven to commit a heinous crime makes for fascinating reading. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Ray A. March has written not just a compelling account of an otherwise little-noted mass murder on a Native American reservation in Northern California, he has made those brutal murders the starting point for a sensitive, complex, and thoroughly researched study of the politics and sociology of Native American life in twenty-first-century small-town America. In the course of telling this remarkable story, March investigates with a keen and knowing eye the underlying causes of the murders and their many ramifications.”—Stanley Cloud, author and former Washington bureau chief of Time magazine

Stanley Cloud

In Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter Ray A. March brings careful research and considerable storytelling abilities to bear on a chilling story. The result is both a page-turner and a thoughtful consideration of how history, racism, identity, and bureaucratic failures fed the conflicts.”—Jon Davis, founder and former director of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts

Jon Davis

"March’s book sounds as a much-needed wakeup call for anybody concerned about the state and future of Indigenous peoples in America."—galandabroadman.com

galandabroadman.com

"[Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter] gives a glimpse into the familial and political conflicts that Indigenous individuals face as they attempt to deal with trauma passed down from generation to generation, while simultaneously try to govern themselves under a flawed U.S. system."—Martha Nakagawa, Rafu Shipmo: LA Japanese Daily News

Rafu Shipmo: LA Japanese Daily News - Martha Nakagawa

2020-06-17
True-crime yarn about an explosion of violence in a particularly obscure corner of northeastern California.

Journalist March, hitherto known for books about golf and environmental matters, turns his eye toward a horrific crime committed on Feb. 20, 2014, when Cherie Rhoades, the ousted president of the tribal council at the Cedarville Rancheria, killed four people during a legal hearing. One was Rhoades’ brother, with whom she had been at odds. “She was well known as a bully,” writes March. “She had a sneak-attack temper that could quickly turn violent. At five feet, six inches and 185 pounds she looked like a middle guard.” She also had little connection to the Northern Paiute people: She had grown up White in fairly horrible circumstances, but enrolling in the tribe allowed her to take a share of the casino-profits distribution to Native people and, soon enough, to move enough family members to Cedarville, with only some 35 residents, to gain control. Soon enough, too, her brother, who “could be kind and he could be vengeful,” accused her of embezzling tribal funds. March condemns not only Rhoades, who was sentenced to death, but also a system of Indian governance without much oversight—and what oversight there is comes by way of the notoriously inept federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. March’s attention to these matters sometimes comes spilling out without much apparent concern for transitions or the niceties of organization. However, despite his tendency to dart from topic to topic, the narrative hits on some centrally important questions: Who is an Indian? Who decides? And “to what extent is tribal dysfunction and the dysfunction present in contemporary Native American culture something that state and federal policy, especially gambling policy, incentivizes?”

A story that moves from murder to larger issues of identity, cultural genocide, and Native American life.

Kirkus Reviews