I had known that some Native American groups, who'd been forced from their homelands because White settlers wanted the land, had been removed to barren, unpromising territory which later proved to be oil-rich. It seemed like a fine, ironic turn of events.
What I didn't know is that The Government, in its so-called wisdom, had deemed the Native Americans incapable of administering the fortunes that accrued to them through their headrights. And so (White) guardians were appointed for these individuals.
Many of the guardians took advantage of their positions to skim off vast amounts of money. Some went even further.
Some of these guardians had multiple possessors of headrights in their care. But that wasn't enough. And so began the mysterious spate of deaths among the wealthy Osage.
Due to the unwillingness/inability of local law enforcement to act, eventually the fledgling FBI became involved. And that's another interesting story.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a fascinating tale of venality and corruption, the extent of which will probably never be fully known. A necessary read.
(An aside: isn't that a great title! As it turns out though, it has only the most tenuous link to the events. Ah, well.)
6 comments:
Sounds very interesting, book and movie. I'm sure I'll come out of the experience of reading or watching with anger towards those men who perpetrated all the unbalances in life toward the natives.
The Martin Scorsese film, with its star-laden cast, will bring these awful events to a wide audience, regardless of what the book-banners want.
Oh dear. The past isn't all glorious.
I get ever more shocked at what we're uncovering about the not so glorious past. Just watched a TV series here about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Terrible.
This sounds like a book and film the Americans should watch to learn about their real US history. I don’t think I’ll read it or watch it as I would get so very upset. I came to the US quite interested in learning about the Native Indians. I remember at the time in France, on magazines, there were articles about sending monthly amounts to “help a poor starving American Indian child” because people of the US did not care about them, and life expectancy on reservations was around 40 years (I don’t know what it is now.) These ads were as those you would have seen in US magazines about a poor starving African child.
When I arrived in the US in the 1960s one of my priorities was to visit several reservations to see for myself. I visited the Mohawk Tribe in Canada as well. I did visit several reservations and was appalled. I started to support Native charities and to this day I send money to Native American Nations charities yearly or more often on special projects (such as clean water .) I support the effort to free Leonard Peltier (as many in France do, as his case is well known there.) He has been incarcerated for decades on very poor evidence (I hope he will be freed next year.) He is a Lakota Indian of French descent. I remember how Nelson Mandela campaigned to have him freed, to no avail. What the US has done to the original inhabitants of this country is beyond atrocious.
Read the book a few years back. Fascinating and very sad (and infuriating) read.
I agree that the plight of Native Americans had essentially been ignored here, while pleas for other groups outside the USA proliferate. Not that there isn't need there also. I support some of the charities when I can, but never feel it's enough.
Sometimes the world is a very upsetting place.
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