Why Do We Only Know Now?

(Any comments--contact me at dadofprince@gmail.com. Thanks!)

It's a terrific movie, even though it's more than three hours long. I honestly didn't notice.

"Killers of the Flower Moon" is a story that has been aching to be told. Based on a book by David Grann, a reporter for the New York Times, it depicts what amounts to a slaughter in slow motion, an act of moral depravity that leaves one's blood cold to consider the calculation of it all.

Dispersed to reservation land in Oklahoma, the Osage tribe found itself camped squarely above an incredibly rich oil deposit. This was the early 1920s, when automobiles were first gaining popularity in the American culture. The monetary boom was incredible, and the Osage took maximum advantage. Per capita, they became the richest people in the world. They bought expensive cars, lived in enormous mansions, hired whites as chauffeurs.

But the white culture was caught unawares, and jealousy and racism combined into a toxic stew. First by legislation in the national Congress, then by trickery and murder, that money changed hands. Playing the long game, white men married Native women to gain access to the 'headlight,' the legal permission to claim benefits from inheritances, then they killed them--sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly so as not to raise suspicion.

The depiction of this is brilliantly done, as you might guess, by director Martin Scorcese, who appears in a brief cameo first before the film begins to thank people for coming to face the terrible results of greed and avarice, and then comes in at the end as part of his own film. Starring are Robert DiNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio as perpetrators in this awful scheme. It is a film with all the earmarks of a classic.

It is Lily Gladstone as DiCaprio's Native wife who steals the film, though. She is the confused eyes and ears of the oncoming trouble, and is typically victimized by the web of deception that's needed to maintain access to the huge reservoir of cash available. I'll let you either read the book--I've heard it's quite good--or see the film to discover her fate.

Here's my question, though, echoing someone to whom I mentioned the film: Why do we only know this now? Why is this such a revelation one hundred years later?

Because the history of minority groups in this country needs to be hidden, that's why. I taught history for 30 years and I had absolutely no idea about this. None. I thought that, with the revelation of the Tulsa massacre of blacks in 1921--which took long enough to find common school history books--Oklahoma's racism had reached a peak. Uh-uh. There was more. Much more.

That's an embarrassment. Or at least it should be to those who keep track of such things. That people were subjected to lengthy incarceration for such crimes shouldn't have been sufficient to fulfill retribution. The country should have known about it, discussed it, and made sure it was chronicled in its history books.

It wasn't. Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that this wasn't part of our national priorities. I'm not in the least surprised.

After all, just half a century before that outrageous event, we were killing, and were proud to be killing without conscience, other Natives for being in the way of our expanding settlements. The Osage that found themselves sitting atop buckets of money were in fact being shoved onto what others believed to be worthless land, just so someone could say that they were promised something--the vast vestiges of broken treaties and mass murders, willing and accidental, that followed.

That millions of mostly white kids throughout America were robbed of this information is the creation of mass deception, deception that is still being promoted today. It's almost necessary, lest we admit to ourselves that these Natives, as well as those who preceded them, had equal value to the rest of us. It is necessary, too, to a culture that refuses to admit that racism has always permeated it, lying just beneath daily life, surfacing here and there like an emotional volcano.

If this had happened to WASPs, there would be no end of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Instead, this is another footnote to the racism that survives and thrives right now, racism that has flourished and will continue to flourish unabated if the wrong person gets elected president next year. Remember, he was responsible for the separation of thousands of children from immigrant families. Press vigilance couldn't stop it. Moral rectitude certainly couldn't stop it. The only thing that stopped it was electoral defeat.

It was his quickly assembled gang of historical tricksters, too, that devised a "1776 Project" in an attempt to counteract the "1619 Project," the latter of which unearthed new facts and new attitudes towards a new understanding that the very basis of the development of the resources that made us the world powerhouse we are came from the need for white supremacy. The former's thinking blossomed in the sewage pits, and brought forth the quasi-truth that some of the slaves acquired skills because they had been enslaved--as if they couldn't have learned them, or even gotten better skills, had they been free. These it-wasn't-all-bad dismissals remove the need for reckoning with a past that has had some acts of serious, unreported corruption.

Martin Scorcese has seen that, and has spent considerable time and attention to just one, terrifying process of minority slaughter. More than 300--no one knows exactly how many--Osage people were killed by this complex plot. That it took months to remove them from the earth instead of one cavalry charge at a time against Native resistance does not diminish the simple fact that many whites were complicit about both branches of the same genocide. We have never overlooked it, but we have failed repeatedly to deal with its enormity.

We went on instead, mournful like having someone's else's pet getting run over by a car, then turning away and getting on with our profitable lives. That failure was not lost on Hitler, who said more than once that his model for ridding the world of all Jews was that of Americans and their collective disdain, and racial dominance, of the Natives who were here first and who were pushed around and wiped out until almost none were left. If our whites did that, why couldn't he? What gave them their right to moral rectitude?

And why are we ignoring that, too? Because one who is clearly following in his footsteps is now plotting on revenge toward others who, in the interim period between what might be his two terrible reigns, have done their best to reveal truths that he's understandably (to understand, though, is not to approve), but deservedly, uncomfortable with. Some of these are now being played out, or soon will be played out, in court. We will see what accountability he faces. Remember: Hitler served only nine months in prison for trying to overthrow his government.

If that ugly history won't matter, nothing will. We will be left with no past that will matter, either. And no future.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark