“We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable” – William Faulkner
The atrocities committed by the United States against its indigenous people is not an unfamiliar story. Only the scariest of blind patriots would deny that this nation has done wrong by the native populations and are likely denying something in themselves by doing so. Given the depravity of the systematic removal, war, and genocide carried out, reading about the Reign of Terror – committed against the Osage tribe in the early nineteen hundreds – shouldn’t be more affecting than any other historical account. From this context leaps Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann.
In his meticulous and riveting retelling of the Osage County Murders, Grann is both poetic and informative. His descriptions of the Osage County countryside show a true knack for writing that can be sorely missed in historical recounts and his carefully crafted research manifests itself in into a landscape of storytelling, each piece is woven into the larger picture, as opposed to a bullet for bullet recitation of sources. Grann is cautious in telling the Osage story to avoid portrayal of a mere documentation of butchery, what sets this story apart is that it is deeply personal. This makes Killers of the Flower Moon a uniquely unsettling book.
The Osage tribe was essentially forced from their land by western expansion, moving to a virtual wasteland. When oil is discovered on the infertile lands, the approaching industrial revolution turns the reservation into a boomtown. The Osage Indian Tribe becomes impeccably wealthy with every oil operation having to pay handsome dividends to members of the tribe. Had this land been owned by white people, we’d know their family name today like we know the Bush family name or other old money oil families. In the case of the Osage, they were met with a murderous plot, the size and scope of which is truly astounding. Stretching across every branch of government, industry fat cats, law enforcement, medical professionals, pastors, and renown criminals it seems every sect of America could be indicted as a key player in the plot to terrorize, murder, and rob the Osage Tribe out of its headright.
Eventually, the FBI is born and takes the Osage as its first case. These sections show Grann at his worst. The Bureau seems too lionized (Hoover’s own human rights violations are relegated to a single sentence, referring to them as “scandals”) and the agents on the case archetypically cartoonish. When you learn the murders themselves were carried out by people who spent nearly their entire lives getting close to the Osage, treating them like humans in a nation that thought them uncivilized dogs, your stomach will literally turn. Which is far from a spoiler, the real suspense doesn’t come from the mystery of who might be killing the Osage tribe, but how a human being can be capable of doing so. Grann documents, even further than the newborn FBI did at the time of the case, the vast conspiracy to systematically destroy a group of people for simply living on land they were forced to own through oppressive western expansion. It should be taught in every school.
