The history of economic exploitation in “Killers of the Flower Moon”
The history of economic exploitation in “Killers of the Flower Moon”
This month for the “Econ Extra Credit” project, instead of watching a documentary, “Marketplace Morning Report” is watching a feature film based on the historical record, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese.
Members of the Osage Nation had been forced onto what was thought to be relatively worthless land in Oklahoma that turned out to be oil rich. The film tells the story from the 1920s of the “Reign of Terror” and murder faced by Osage people, at the hands of exploiters trying to take their oil resources and their personal money.
Jean Dennison is a citizen of the Osage Nation, an associate professor of American Indian Studies and co-director of the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Washington. She has a recent piece about the film in Time. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio for more. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: You’re generally all right with this feature film, even if something like that can’t tell the whole story?
Jean Dennison: “Killers of the the Flower Moon” is such an important story in that it tells a story that is legally not allowed to be told in our public schools in Oklahoma right now — a story about race and a story about colonialism and something that our teachers would literally be fired for in the state. And so therefore, I’m really glad that this movie has been made. I do think though that there are some real challenges that you can see that develop in the film in terms of not having Osages be the ones who tell the story. Osages are represented as a dying race, as a group of people who are being overcome by colonial histories and colonial processes, and are not represented in ways that show how creative and strategic we really are and have always been. It also doesn’t really fully capture the history of colonialism that led to and created this moment. And it certainly doesn’t capture the ways in which we have continued to find ways to thrive up to and through the 21st century.
Brancaccio: Let’s zoom into some terms that come up in the film that are crucial. First of all, a headright.
Dennison: So the headright is this fascinating system that was created by the United States government as part of the efforts that the United States government has been attempting with many Native nations, including the Osage Nation, for most of its history, which is an effort to try to do away with Native peoples, right? To eliminate, to erase who and what we are, so as to more facilitate gaining access to the land.
And so in the Osage context, what happened with this is that we had an active government that existed in place, and then the United States government came in and said, “That government isn’t going to work.” And so reworked and reworked, and came up with another governmental system, and this was our 1881 constitutional government. And it was put in place to really mitigate the very complicated, colonial situation that we found ourselves in. And, similarly, again, the United States government said that system of justice, that system of law isn’t allowing us to do what we want, which at this point in time — we’re talking about the 1900s — was to allot the Osage reservation and to enable Oklahoma statehood.
And so, again, the Osage government was done away with and a council was put in place. And really this was an effort to take the Osage — especially the headright system — was a system to take the Osage and turn us into a corporation model. And so the headright is an artifact of that. There was an allotment system that happened in 1906 for the Osage Nation. And we advocated — throughout all of these processes, you can see Osages constantly trying to navigate the very complicated situations and make them as good for ourselves as we possibly could. So we advocated that none of our land be allotted to non-Osages. And we advocated that we maintain the mineral estate as a national commodity for the Osage Nation, rather than as something that was going to go out to individuals.
And so the headright came to represent your share in this larger oil production, the wealth that was produced from that. And it got more complicated over the years, because people were allowed to pass on their headrights to whomever they wanted. So we still have a huge number of headrights — estimated around one-fourth — that are going out to places like the Catholic Church and Oklahoma University, that the people willed or left their headrights to them. Nowadays, you can give your headright to someone who’s not Osage, but only for the lifetime. This usually happens in the context of spouses. But, generally, it’s understood that you can only now pass headrights on to other Osages.
Brancaccio: When I read the book first, before seeing the film, this term “guardianship” is a key concept, a shocking concept. I was curious to see if the film addresses guardianship. It does. It does repeatedly. What is guardianship in the terms of the film?
Dennison: So, again, it’s hard to tell any of these stories in short soundbites. There’s a lot of history that goes into the creation of these ideas. So, in this context, what we see with guardianship happening is the assumption that the Osage people are not competent to manage their own affairs, right? The assumption — and this was built into almost all of the colonial ideology that existed at the time, and it was underpinning so much of the federal policies that existed around American Indian peoples — was this idea that Indigenous peoples could not make decisions for ourselves. And so, we didn’t have the savvy, that we weren’t capable.
And so you have this moment in time where you have all of these corrupt people taking advantage of the fact that the federal government has created a void of justice in the Osage Nation, where the governance systems that existed for the Osage had been stripped away from us. And instead of facilitating us to step back in and take back our governance systems, instead of facilitating us to be able to make our own justice systems again, what the federal government does is not blame the people that are coming in or punish the people that are coming in, but instead says, “Osages, you can’t handle your own affairs yourselves. Clearly you need somebody to come in and protect you. Clearly you need somebody to come in and look out for your interests.” When the only reason why any of these needs existed was because of federal policies that had taken away so much from us, including our systems of justice.
Brancaccio: And it was a system, this guardianship system, that was ripe for intense abuse. I mean, it was at the center of really an industry of exploitation.
Dennison: Yeah, absolutely. And it was this system that was really tailor-made to exploit Osages, tailor-made to concentrate wealth. In fact, I would say that the Osage Reign of Terror is really a logical response to federal Indian policies and what they set up in the context of the Osage Nation.
Brancaccio: So people understand: People of sound mind couldn’t make their own decisions about their own money. An outsider, a guardian, would tell people, “No it’s not a good idea. You can’t use your money that way.”
Dennison: There are so many stories where people would try to go and buy a lawnmower or a lamp, and they wouldn’t ultimately be able to have a say in, not only which lamp they purchase, but how much they spent on that lamp. A lamp would just show up. And so, again, it’s hard to imagine there not being a corrupt system built around this, because it’s just too tempting to say, “Well, I’ll buy the lamp from my friend.” And then it’s like, “Well, who’s to say that we can’t make a little bit of extra money as we buy the lamp from my friend?”
Brancaccio: I mean, the film was mainly in the 1920s. It takes us a bit at the end into the 1930s. It does not take us up to the present day. But you witnessed a crucial change in the law involving the Osage Nation. What was it, 2006 and a new constitution?
Dennison: From 2004 to 2006, the Osage Nation embarked on a really brave project, which was to figure out for ourselves what kind of government we wanted in the 21st century and what kind of citizenship we needed. And these are not easy decisions. These are very fraught and complicated decisions, especially given the ongoing colonial process and how it impacts Osages. And so it was a really exciting moment to be able to witness firsthand the writing of a constitution. And we did this in the Osage Nation by a whole series of community meetings. There were over 40 community meetings, and there was a survey, and a phone poll, and a referendum vote on a whole host of decisions. And it was a really amazing thing to watch happen — Osages to finally be in this moment of getting to take back this right of ours, to determine for ourselves what kind of government we wanted, and to be able to assert sovereignty in such an exciting way.
And it was really cool what came out of it. It was a three-part government with a system of checks and balances that was really clearly modeled after our 1881 government, which had been illegally abolished. And so it’s a real path of synergy to be able to say, “This is what we want for ourselves to take us forward.” And it’s been so exciting to see what has been able to come out of this in terms of what the Osage Nation is now able to do, that, for 100 years when we had a government system imposed on us by the federal government, by the [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was to do amazing things. Like to take over an Indian health clinic, which was really struggling. I mean, it literally had a X-ray machine that was originally designed to use on animals rather than humans. And then it was, hand-me-down of three generations that was in our clinic. And to be able to replace those things and to do things like third-party billing to provide much better services for our people. We’ve also been able to use our casino revenues to support language revitalization and to purchase our land back. So, ultimately, we’re using this new government system to rebuild our systems of justice, as well as our relations to land, which had been so disrupted by the colonial process.
Brancaccio: You mentioned language programs to preserve and really to teach Osage the language?
Dennison: One of the really exciting things, that required gaming revenues, was for the Osage Nation to really be able to invest in our language. And it’s been so exciting to watch that process develop.
One of the things — people sometimes will talk about losing a language. And, ultimately, languages aren’t lost. If anything they’re taken. But, in reality, people will talk about them as sleeping or as something that continues to exist — we just have to rebuild our relationships with it. And so that’s really what the Osage Nation has done, is work to rebuild our relations with the language that exists. And we’ve kept the language alive in really powerful ways through our In-Lon-Schka ceremonial dances and in other places and contexts. And it’s been really powerful to be able to see all of the cool effort that’s being put into not only making it something that we have enough of the materials available to us to preserve it, as I said, but really importantly, as you’re saying, to teach the language.
And so one of the really cool projects that has come out of the language program in the Osage Nation is that we developed an orthography, which is our own unique writing system. So that we can teach the language in a way that honors and respects the sounds and the ideas behind it, and not just use English letters or Roman alphabets to represent these things, but have really precise symbols that represent our unique sounds. And we’ve been able to do this through a cool embrace of technology, too, right? So getting this orthography into Unicode, so that now we can send text messages in the language to each other, we can post on Facebook in the language to make it part of our everyday lives in this really powerful way.
Another really cool use of technology in the language program has been our classes. And we now have huge number of classes that are offered. Pretty much every day of the week there’s a different class that you can take on Zoom or hybrid classes. And so, no matter where you are, as an Osage citizen, you can find time and take a language class, which is really powerful.
Brancaccio: And also you mentioned — we’re talking language now — but you also mentioned land, efforts to buy back Osage land that was lost last century?
Dennison: Yes, absolutely. So land is, of course, a central component of our nation-building efforts. And we’ve been working to reclaim our reservation. And a lot of the land, of course, was taken. I mean, this is part of what “Killers of the Flower Moon” the story tells, is how and in what ways that land was taken from us. And a lot of non-Osage ranchers, during the 1920s and ’30s, gained access to our land through what some people would call as legitimate, and then certainly a whole host of illegitimate ways.
And this has threatened not only our sense of ourselves as a nation, but also really our ability to feed and care for ourselves. Really excitingly, in 2016, Ted Turner put up for auction his entire 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch, which is at the center of the Osage reservations. And Osage leaders seized this opportunity to be able to fulfill some of our own strategic planning, and were able to buy this land back. Importantly, we had to spend far over what market value of this land was. This was not land that anybody was going to give back, right? This was land that we had to buy back. But we were able to do this because of, again, our casino revenues. And so this is where you can see the power of economy at work, in terms of us using these resources that are available to us not for just economic ends — we didn’t see this land as an investment in our economy or something that we were going to profit off of — but something that was necessary for our health and wellbeing. To be able to rebuild our relationships with bison, with the plants and animals that had sustained us for so many generations. To be able to bring back health to our community, as we are able to get out on the land and that that’s part of what makes us healthy, are those relationships. And so, seeing these investments, seeing things like casino revenues as a tool that we can use in the 21st century to be able to not just rebuild our nation, but ensure that our people have a future.
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