Review: Killers of the Flower Moon
- tatedecaro
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
3/5
TW: Hate crimes, systemic racism and dehumanization, violence/murder, alcoholism, forced institutionalization, forced removal
This is just one of many, many stories about the ways in which the U.S. government screwed over Native populations. One of many stories the history books gloss over. It's definitely depressing, but, in my view, incredibly important to learn about.
The Osage Native Americans once lived on land that "stretched from what is now Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma and still farther west, all the way to the Rockies.” By the early to mid-1700s. the Osage had been relocated to a 50-by-125 mile area in Kansas, having been forced to cede over 100 million acres to the U.S. government and white settlers. In the late 1800s they were again forced to leave their land, pushed into Oklahoma onto desolate, "worthless" land that no white man would want.
As it turned out, the value of that land skyrocketed when oil was discovered beneath it. By that time, the Osage has secured an agreement that the land's resources belonged solely to the Osage Tribe, and each Osage member received a "headright" to those resources, which could not be sold - only inherited. Having no other way to gain access to this oil-rich land, the federal government imposed a guardianship on most Osage members. This meant that white men were appointed to "help manage" the wealth of Osage, who were considered inherently weak, unreliable, and incapable of managing their own assets.
This book follows the investigation and criminal trials related to the killings of over 20 Osage members in the 1920s. Shot, poisoned, stabbed, blown up, thrown off a moving train - the method varied, but the result was always the same. Somehow, in each case, the headrights of those murdered became the property of a white man. The new Director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations (later the FBI), J. Edgar Hoover sent federal agents to investigate under the direction of Tom White, who managed to expose a chilling and multi-faceted conspiracy that has never been entirely unraveled.
I half-listened / half-read this one, but definitely recommend getting the physical book, because it has a lot of photos, which adds to the narrative.
UP NEXT: A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
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