 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A nonfiction book about Indigenous people.
Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann This is a history book that reads like a mystery/thriller. Thanks to the discovery of oil on their reservation, members of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma were the richest people on earth in the 1920s. But only in theory: the courts could force an Osage person to accept a white "guardian" to control their money. This led to predictable schemes of fraud, embezzlement, kickbacks from businesses to guardians who spent Osage money there, etc. And worse. The right to income from the oil wells (known as a "headright" could not be sold or given to anyone outside the Osage tribe. It could, however, be inherited. Much of the book follows a single family that was haunted by a series of murders and mysterious illnesses. The newly formed FBI sent a team to investigate, and found that evidence and reports had a way of disappearing. Eventually, however, the trail led back to a sociopath who used a variety of schemes to steal Osage oil money, including several who died after he took out life insurance on them, or came up with paperwork purporting to show that they owed him money. The final section of the book takes a step back to look at the bigger picture. The FBI presented this case as a success, multiple murders solved. But there were over a hundred of these suspicious deaths during the years when the Osage people were oil-rich, and most had no connection to the killer that the FBI put away. There were a lot of vultures who descended on the tribe, including a startling number of cases where a white person married an Osage spouse and killed them for the money - even after having children with them. The whole "guardian" system was blatantly designed to get oil profits out of Osage hands and into white ones. It's a textbook example of structural racism - which explains why some school districts in Oklahoma are trying so hard to ban this book.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |