The author, David Grann, presents his understanding of the relationship between the United States government and the Native Americans. He explains that the adverse treatment of the Native Americans was driven by the jealousy the government had for them. The United States government saw all the wealth the Osage tribe had, and it was controversial to the belief the government had about the Native Americans, which was that they should be second-class citizens.
Grann’s novel sheds light on the political attitudes of American authorities toward Native Indians. The American state intensively expanded its borders without regard for the rights of the indigenous population to the territories being developed (RedCorn 27). The armed forces brutally suppressed the Native Americans’ attempts to assert their land rights. As a result of this policy, Indians now live on scraps of land allotted by the U.S. government and have voting rights, but not everywhere (United States Commission on Civil Rights 13). Before slavery was abolished, they were on an equal footing with slaves, the lowest level of civil rights. Treaties made with tribal leaders were not always honored by the government. In his book, Grann tries to restore historical truthfulness and give the descendants of those events solace by revealing the mysteries of the time (117). The author demonstrates the unfair treatment and brutality towards the indigenous peoples, which has been the basis of the authorities’ policy throughout its history.
The story of Molly’s family demonstrates the general attitude of U.S. authorities toward indigenous people. Her relatives’ fate is more than just a private chronology of events of a small group of people. For members of the Osage Nation, the circumstances described in the book remain extremely fresh. David Grann saw Molly as a real person, not a generalized stereotype of just one of the many Indians subjected to segregation, racism, and discrimination. The government’s policy of dispossessing Aboriginal people of lands that were doctrinally regarded as no one’s territory has destroyed the lives of countless Indian families. Molly’s story demonstrates the devastating effect state decisions can have on the fate of defenseless and innocent people.
The colonial worldview allows Europeans to divide people into the good, the white population, and the bad, the native population. Thus, they justified the conquest of America as a necessity that would give the Indians high morals and correct their slumbering savagery. The conquest of the new lands was given an advantageous ideological basis – the economic interest of the greedy conquerors was covered by good intentions. Therefore, the conquistadors, who in fact sought to seize new lands and exploit Indians as cheap labor, were in their own eyes the bearers of salvation for the local pagans. This explanation allowed them to modify and destroy the culture of the indigenous peoples, forcibly indoctrinating them with false values.
Forcing colonial thinking into the minds of Native American children served as a means of disrupting the intergenerational transmission of cultural values. The policy could be considered cultural genocide, used by the American government to confiscate land from American Indians (Leigh-Osroosh and Hutchison 3). The destruction of culture kills people spiritually, leading to their degeneration. The inclusion of individuals in the values of their nations is an important factor in preserving the spiritual culture of a society. As the book’s author rightly points out, colonization destroyed entire peoples by conquering established cultural values.
At the present time, all over the world, along with the rise of ethnic consciousness, there is a tendency for different peoples to recognize their common interests, their universal unity. Cultural identity is formed as a result of the superposition of various cultural influences to which an individual is exposed. Indians are among those who could but were unwilling to give up their own national identity. At the same time, they not only perceive themselves as members of a single union of Native American tribes but also as members of a union of the Earth’s aboriginal peoples (Leigh-Osroosh and Hutchison 15). The Indians perceive themselves as representatives of a universal brotherhood of peoples and seek to build their relations with other nations based on mutual interest and a desire to understand one another.
There is both the ingrowth of Native American communities into the U.S. economic and political system and the search for their own ways of being. These include both cultural assimilation and increasing attention to their history, religion, traditions, and language. The Indians, long perceived as a dying-out vestige of a bygone era, find themselves extremely relevant today with their culture’s simple and immutable truths. With the arrival of Europeans in America, first of all, the economic basis of the Indian’s sense of self-worth was undermined. The traditional Native American way of life has been disrupted throughout history by invading colonialists. However, the people’s resilience in Grann’s novel is undeniably noteworthy and deserves immense respect.
Works Cited
Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Random House Children’s Books, 2021.
Leigh-Osroosh, Katheryne T., and Brian Hutchison. “Cultural Identity Silencing of Native Americans in Education.” Race and Pedagogy Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-33.
RedCorn, Alex. “Considerations for Building a Prosperous and Self-Determining Osage Nation Through Education.” Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, vol. 23, no. 1, 2020, pp. 21–39.
United States Commission on Civil Rights. Broken Promises: Continuing Federal Funding Shortfall for Native Americans. Government Printing Office, 2018.