The True Lore of Deer Woman, with Laurie L. Dove, author of Mask of the Deer Woman

The wind pressed russet grass toward thickets of Osage Orange and elderberry under a high afternoon sun that winked over the river to a granite ridge capped by trees uniform as a barber’s cut. It was autumn in Oklahoma. 

I’d returned to the northeast part of the state, the setting that inspired the fictional location of my debut novel, Mask of the Deer Woman, to ensure my memories had been a solid starting point for my imagination. 

I was alone along the river, far from the two-track I’d driven on, and it was quiet but for a blue jay’s scream in the woods as I knelt to examine a long bone with knobby ends, picked clean and bleached by the sun. The bone belonged to a deer, to one of its fine reedy legs, I decided. Then a new sensation climbed aboard my skin and settled like a hand on the back of my neck. It felt a lot like the things I tended to ignore when chasing an idea: Does anyone know where you are? No. Did you leave your phone in the car? Yes. Were you aware of your surroundings while lost in thought? Not really.

I thought of the women in my book, of stories passed through generations, tales told in ordinary spaces—around fires, over pots steaming on stoves, while working knots out of a child’s hair. I thought of Deer Woman. Avenger, protector, justice-meter. The villain or the hero. The center of a story with many versions. 

As a journalist, I’d built a career on chasing information, and this had taught me something surprising: even with multiple sources, verifying and fact-checking, there were often varied, equally viable stories. Within one truth there is the balance of another truth. In the knowing there exists the unknown. 

These gaps, absences, and multiplicities are what I explore when I write, and this is where I found Deer Woman, a shape-shifting spirit who appears as a beautiful young woman to exact revenge on men who have harmed women and children. Deer Woman became a pivotal part of my novel, but she exists for many people in many places. Within an easy drive of my current residence in Kansas, Deer Woman appears with some frequency at a country cemetery. In Oklahoma, Deer Woman has been seen many times, particularly in the northeast corner of the state. 

Deer Woman existed long before my story was written, and she will exist long after I am gone. She is one of many such creatures across the southern Great Plains that exist at the intersection of myth and reality. 

There is something else, though, haunting the pages of my book—and that is the national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. In my research, I discovered there are an estimated 5,800 Indigenous women who are currently missing, according to the most recent data released by the National Crime Information Center. More shocking still is that the total number of missing Indigenous women is much higher than reported figures. 

These data tracking issues are compounded by a growing body of evidence that missing Indigenous women do not draw the same amount or quality of news coverage as their white counterparts. In Mask of the Deer Woman, it’s something I refer to as “twice gone.” Missing Indigenous women disappear twice: once in life and once in the news. 

Across the Indigenous diaspora, the threat of harm to women has become codified in the story of Deer Woman, which resonates as much as ever today. The lore of Deer Woman is not entirely fiction; there is truth at its center.

I leave the bone behind as I return to the car, the wind at my back. Once inside, I watch life play out through the windshield, birds wheeling through the sky, the bad feeling still rumbling over my flesh. Then I turn the key and leave, the hope of the words I’ll write burning in my heart.