Breaking Arrows, by Luis Figueredo [Review]

The Chief of the small Kialegee Tribe in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma is driven to despair following the death of his grandson. After years resisting the idea of building a casino on tribal land to inject some wealth into the dirt-poor tribe, the Chief realizes that money is essential to protect his people, and a casino is the only reasonable option. Unfortunately for the Kialegee, a larger and now much wealthier tribe, the Muscogee Creek Nation (MCN), already has two casinos in the region and is heavily leveraged. The Chief of the MCN will fight the Kialegee’s plan, and will enlist conservative Oklahoma politicians and the local interest groups who oppose gambling to try to stop the project. The MCN’s claim is that all the Indian land in eastern Oklahoma is under the legal jurisdiction of the MCN and that the Kialegee has no independent claim to build its competing casino based on the treaties and acts of Congress from the 1800s. Sounds like a job for a lawyer.

The Chief brings in a high-powered “superhero” Miami lawyer (Pierce) to organize financing for the project and to lead the battles to overcome the legal, political, and physical obstacles blocking their path. Along the way, author Luis Figueredo attempts to educate his readers about the historical claims the Creek Nation has to land granted to the tribe when its members were forcibly removed from their historical lands in the American south and relocated to Oklahoma in what was called the “Trail of Tears.” More specifically, the story describes the claims the Kialegee have to be recognized as an independent sovereign Indian nation. It’s a fascinating story, and the legal cases, judicial decisions, politics, and history make for a sociological and historical record that’s worth studying. Unfortunately, Mr. Figueredo fails to make the story into a compelling novel.

The author is a lawyer, and the story is more about the litigation and the court battles than about the Kialegee characters. And while courtroom scenes can be compelling in a murder trial, the procedural arguments about whether a district court has jurisdiction to issue an injunction is not gripping theater. And no author can make a discussion about the parole evidence rule interesting. Yet, that’s what Mr. Figueredo attempts here, without ultimate success. (What’s even more of a head-scratcher is that he chose not to include the story of McGirt v. Oklahoma, where the Supreme Court ruled that a huge amount of land in Oklahoma is the sovereign land of the Creek nation.) The legal drama, very meaningful to the parties involved, would make an interesting backdrop if there were an otherwise compelling cast of characters who had interesting relationships, but the latter element is missing here and the legal battle itself, and the lawyers, are not enough to carry the story.

Part of the problem is that the author imbues his characters at the moment of their introduction with clear roles as heroes or villains. Each new character is immediately described as a greedy, two-faced liar or a forthright, brave warrior for justice. This makes the characters one-dimensional and doesn’t allow the reader to draw conclusions or interpret events. There is no gray here – everything is black or white. All the politicians opposed to the Kialegee are corrupt and dishonest, all the MCN Indians are oath-breakers and greedy near-white-men. It doesn’t create any depth for the story, and the characters themselves don’t have much conflict or even relationships. The Chief has a bombshell daughter who was briefly a porn star after she ran away from the tribe. She plays a critical part in the fight for the casino, but she has no romantic interest and is lost for long stretches. The Chief is old and both wise and melancholy, but his stoic face doesn’t change expression much. The superhero lawyer, Pierce, somehow is both a titan of corporate finance and capital deals involving casino construction and also a skilled litigator who battles it out cross-examining witnesses during hearings and argues before appellate courts. Such lawyers don’t really exist. Pierce is such a hero that, even when his side loses a decision made by a corrupt and paid-off judge (the only way he could lose, right?), he is solid and confident. Pierce believes in the cause, but is a hired gun and doesn’t establish much of a relationship with the Indian characters. In the end, there’s not much character-driven story here, which is the main problem. There are a few flashes of action (such as when the MCN sends in an armed assault team to take the casino by force), but most of the “action” is inside courtrooms and features the lawyers. There are also a number of characters who drop into the story when needed for the course of the litigations, but who otherwise have no connections to the rest of the narratives or any of the other characters.

On top of these rather big problems, the writing here is sometimes sloppy, with dozens of errors in the copy (including some in the legal terminology, which is unforgiveable in a novel by a lawyer about a lawyer). The pacing drags in many places, owing to the inherent dullness of procedural legal arguments. The timeline is not carefully planned out. Many events happen far faster than in real life (like having a casino well under construction only months after securing financing), and there are long gaps in the narrative without any temporal queues to let the reader know how much time has passed. The result is a kind of fairy tale about the Kialegee’s legal battle, with no real moral other than that persistence wins out in the end and the good guys always win.

And yet, the story of the Kialegee tribe is still fascinating. Getting a better understanding of how the Creek nation was treated by the US government, and by the state of Oklahoma, and by the Oil and Gas companies who stole their reservation land from them even after they were banished to what was believed to be wasteland – is a great and tragic story. Slogging through the text here has some value because of that story, and the narrative of how a persistent lawyer can fight the interest groups and the politicians and win an epic battle. It’s a great subject for a novel, but you’d be better off checking out a history book from the library and reading about the real story of the Oklahoma Indians.  (The author uses “Indian” rather than Native American throughout the book, which I have no problem with.) This novelization provides neither the best history lesson, nor the best summary of the legal battles, and certainly has no compelling characters or story to keep you more interested than a history text.