Mass Murder in California's Empty Quarter
A Tale of Tribal Treachery at the Cedarville Rancheria
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- € 24,99
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- € 24,99
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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.
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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.
