Becoming the Backdrop: The Oppression of Native Americans in Hollywood cinema, and 'Killers of the Flower Moon'
Friday, 04 October 2024 21:56

Becoming the Backdrop: The Oppression of Native Americans in Hollywood cinema, and 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Published in Films
 
Killers of the Flower Moon is a recent epic movie set in the 1920s examining a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation, who became wealthy when oil was found on their tribal land. The film is set in Oklahoma (Choctaw language phrase: okla, 'people', and humma, 'red') and depicts the story of a local political boss who was contriving to steal the Osage wealth. The film is long, with a running time of 206 minutes, and shows an ensemble cast of well-known actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser.

It did well, grossing $157 million worldwide as well as receiving critical acclaim, with praise for Scorsese's direction, the screenplay, production values, editing, cinematography, musical score, and cast performances, especially DiCaprio, Gladstone, and De Niro. It was also nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture; seven Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and with Gladstone winning Best Actress; nine British Academy Film Awards; and three SAG Awards, with Gladstone winning Best Actress."

The story revolves around Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) who comes to live with his brother and uncle William King Hale on Hale's reservation ranch after World War I. Hale is a reserve deputy sheriff and cattle rancher who poses as a friend of the Osage while at the same time secretly organising the killing of the Osage through multiple different means such as shooting, poisoning, and even blowing up a house. Ernest Burkhart marries Mollie Kyle, an Osage whose family owns oil headrights.
 
Lily Gjpg

Lily Gladstone's portrayal of Mollie Burkhart garnered critical acclaim, earning her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress

Mollie decides to go to Washington and asks President Calvin Coolidge for help in solving the murders. Bureau of Investigation (the eventual FBI) Agent Thomas Bruce White Sr. and his assistants are sent to Oklahoma to find out who is behind the murders. White finds out the truth and persuades Ernest to confess his involvement and testify against his uncle Hale. Hale and Ernest are sentenced to life imprisonment but both were paroled after years of incarceration, despite Osage protests to the parole board.

Killers of the Flower Moon has themes which differ from traditional Westerns in that the 'cowboys' are focused on oil production and resent the community that owns the rights to oilfields. It is also different in that law and order is controlled not by the local sheriff [who is corrupt in this case] but by the federal state who sends in its agents to find out what is going on. This twentieth century concept of the developing power of the state taking over from the nineteenth century local power of the sheriff is only the start. The newly developed FBI launches into containing local criminality with all the power and forces of the federal state. The FBI went on to be involved in the capture and deaths of numerous infamous mobsters of the day, including John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly.

The Osage case is also depicted in the 1959 American crime drama film, The FBI Story, showing how the FBI developed from a detective agency to an enforcement agency with the statutory authority to carry guns and make arrests:

The FBI was compelled to investigate after one of the [Osage] murders was committed on federal government land. The FBI forensics laboratory ties the doctored wills and life insurance policies of the murder victims to a local banker, Dwight McCutcheon, with the typewriter that he used.
 
Native Americans and Hollywood cinema

In Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese had originally intended that Leonardo DiCaprio would play the FBI agent who solves the crimes. However screenwriter Eric Roth began to fear the story underplayed the experience of the Osage people and repeated tired tropes. "We didn't want to go much further with this Great White Hope saving Native Americans," says Roth. This fear of stereotyping led to Scorsese meeting with members of the Osage community in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, including Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, the principal chief of the Osage Nation.

Hollywood has had a long history of depicting Native Americans in cinema. The Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond covers a century of the portrayal of North American Natives in his documentary Reel Injun:

Reel Injun explores the various stereotypes about Natives in film, from the noble savage to the drunken Indian. It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American on screen. The film also explores Hollywood's practice of using Italian Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.
 
Reel Injun FilmPoster

Reel Injun film poster

Scorsese was obviously aware that to be taken seriously today he would have to involve the Osage Nation in the making of this film. This story involved an extraordinary situation for Native Americans anywhere in North America, as the Osage directly benefited from the natural resources of their territory.

"I was anxious," Scorsese says. "I knew that if I could not gain their trust, then there's no sense in making the film. As a European American, a Sicilian American, I may have natural limitations, and I hoped that they would forgive that. But they had to know it was coming from the right place and not a surface revisionism, which is simplistic. I wanted something really, really complex that deals with humanity." [...] "One of the people in the room said, 'You have to be very careful. You're putting words in the mouths of people that ... These are real people to us. They're part of our families.' "

The depiction of the Native Americans from the early cinematic beginnings emphasised violence, vacillating from violence to be admired to violence to be feared, depending on the ideological needs of each decade in the twentieth century. When America was under internal or external threat then the violence of the 'Injun' was to be feared. When America needed a strong identity, a powerful role model of the fearless warrior, then the Native American was to be admired. In either case the violence provides catharsis for the colonising power. Even though it is the Native Americans that are being depicted, their needs are secondary.

Many white actors played Native American roles and had no concern for Native American opinions about their roles. "White people playing native roles? I love it, 'cos it's funny!" says Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker, Chris Eyre, in Reel Injun. Native Americans were played by Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Elvis Presley, Boris Karloff, Anthony Quinn, Chuck Connors, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sylvester Stallone, Pierce Brosnan, Johnny Depp and others.

In Smoke Signals, a 1998 coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Chris Eyre, there is an awareness of the Romanticist portrayal of the Native American as a hero for white audiences. Similarly, white heroes were seen as belonging to the colonial cultural mindset. In Smoke Signals, Thomas Builds-the-Fire argues: "Nobody can help us. No Superman. No Batman. No Wonder Woman. Not even Charles Bronson, man." (Reel Injun)
 
Smoke Signals
 
Smoke Signals film poster

Killers of the Flower Moon
 tells a Native American story and is even populated with Osage actors - yet it is still a white man's story, paid for and dominated by, white actors. While it is difficult for any group to tell their story, especially in an expensive medium like cinema, it is even more difficult to imagine the dominant group/oppressor telling your story. Can we expect the British to make radical films about Irish uprisings against British rule? Can we expect the Israelis to make films about the Palestinian struggle against settler land grabs?
 
This is not to say it is impossible, or to object to others telling the stories. Two of the best movies made about recent Irish history were made by British directors: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) by Ken Loach and Hunger (2008) by Steve McQueen, covering the Irish War of Independence and the 1980s Hunger Strikes respectively. However, ultimately the victims are the best to tell their own stories, for nuance and perspective on the oppressor. This is arguably because the oppressor ultimately always makes the story about themselves, trying to deal with their past shame  - assuming, of course, that their narrative is sympathetic to the victims and not the oppressors.
 
The missing analysis of structural oppression
 
However, the feeling of being a helpless bystander persists. As Jesse Wente, a Ojibway film critic, remarks about Dances with Wolves (1990), one of the most successful films about the American West:

The natives were fleshed out as characters, allowed to be seen as more complete people. They weren't just warriors; they weren't just peaceful. There was a very sensitive and sympathetic approach. It doesn't erase the fact that at it's core the film is not a native movie. It is still a movie made from the outside of us and it's about us and is meant to be sympathetic towards us. But, it isn't us. It's a story about a white guy. And, Indians are the T and A, but it gets promoted as being about native people or Indians, but it's not, really. We're just backdrop. (Reel Injun)
 
What is missing is an analysis of structural oppression that exists in economic, legal and social forms in society and the ways in which people experience oppressive conditions in their daily lives. That oppression is defined as structures of domination and oppression that gives other groups the power to determine one's actions. Thus,
 
Individuals experience oppressive conditions because they are part of a group that is defined on the basis of shared characteristics such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, age, ability, etc. These major social groups have specific attributes, stereotypes and norms associated with them.
 
In 'Five Faces of Oppression', Iris Young discusses five types of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Under the heading of Exploitation, Young discusses the question of the ownership of the means of production and the necessity for labour power. If you are the owner you gain from the profit generated from the production. In the case of the Osage they gained royalties from oil licensing not from oil extraction which required ownership of the equipment to do so. Therefore they received a small portion of the profits accrued. 
 
In terms of Marginalization, Native Americans on reservations are marginalized by high unemployment rates and limited opportunities to develop marketable skills. 
 
Under the heading of Powerlessness, different types of jobs confer levels of status on their employees. When we combine status with class, "most people of color have to prove their social respectability –– it is not assumed or automatically granted."
 
Under Cultural Imperialism "cultural dominance refers to the way that one group's experiences, cultural expressions and history are defined as superior to all other groups' experiences and histories." In this narrative of the 'helpless' Osage community the dominant view of justice is to find out who is doing the killing, which in turn, justifies the 'universalist' idea that one is living in a community that 'cares'. 
 
The last heading, Violence, covers two types of structural violence: state-sanctioned racial segregation backed up by violence, and the range of violent tactics used against the Osage that is based on knowledge power controlled by elites, for example, new medicines and explosives.
 
In this way we can see how institutions and those with power work together with individual attitudes rooted in white privilege, patriarchy, and capitalism to keep the working class poor, while at the same time, allow the wealthy to maintain and increase their capital accumulation.
 
The people's own social and cultural movements towards freedom
 
These issues will never be resolved within a system and ideology that only discusses distributive issues and never discusses such basic fundamentals as the ownership and control of the means of production. This is where the transition in thinking from capitalist ideology to socialist ideology becomes essential.
 
In the meantime, films like Killers of the Flower Moon are a step in the right direction in that the involvement of groups on the margins in major cinematic productions encourages confidence and desire to see more. The possibility of a cinema that not only looks at marginalised histories but also writes into the narrative a demonstration of the structural aspects of oppression is always potentially on the horizon, especially as the means of production in cinema become cheaper to obtain and use, and more accessible to ordinary people.
 
As Killers of the Flower Moon depicts a Native American story and uses Native American actors, it could and should inspire Native Americans to make their own independent films that include a structural analysis. I don't think we can ever expect Hollywood to make such films, as the American neocon and militarised state is so embedded in the Hollywood system. In the end, a new cinema will have to arise from the people's own social and cultural movements towards freedom, filling a vacuum created by the contrast between Hollywood fantasy and stark social realities.
 
Although in the Native American, Irish, and Palestinian stories, failures were more common than successes, the depiction of struggle is always profound no matter what era the story is set in. The difficulties, the hardships, the bravery, the resistance is always inspiring.
 
Friday, 04 October 2024 21:56

The Gangsters in the U.S. Government: Killers of the Harvest Moon

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Torivio Fodder reviews Scorsese's new film, arguing that although gangsters are the villains in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ the biggest thief of Native American wealth was the US government

Director Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” tells the true story of a string of murders on the Osage Nation’s land in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Based on David Grann’s meticulously researched 2017 book, the movie delves into racial and family dynamics that rocked Oklahoma to the core when oil was discovered on Osage lands.

White settlers targeted members of the Osage Nation to steal their land and the riches beneath it. But from a historical perspective, this crime is just the tip of the iceberg.

From the early 1800s through the 1930s, official U.S. policy displaced thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homes through the policy known as Indian removal. And throughout the 20th century, the federal government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural resources like timber, oil and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to disburse to the land’s owners. But it failed to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what they were due.

I am the manager of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Governance Program and a law professor. My ancestry is Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee on my father’s side and Taos Pueblo on my mother’s side. From my perspective, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is just one chapter in a much larger story: The U.S. was built on stolen lands and wealth.

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Westward expansion and land theft

In the standard telling, the American West was populated by industrious settlers who eked out livings from the ground, formed cities and, in time, created states. In fact, hundreds of Native nations already lived on those lands, each with their own unique forms of government, culture and language.

In the early 1800s, eastern cities were growing and dense urban centers were becoming unwieldy. Indian lands in the west were an alluring target – but westward expansion ran up against what would become known was “the Indian problem.” This widely used phrase reflected a belief that the U.S. had a God-given mandate to settle North America, and Indians stood in the way.

In the early 1800s, treaty-making between the U.S. and Indian nations shifted from a cooperative process into a tool for forcibly removing tribes from their lands.

Starting in the 1830s, Congress pressured Indian tribes in the east to sign treaties that required the tribes to move to reservations in the west. This took place over the objections of public figures such as Tennessee frontiersman and congressman Davy Crockett, humanitarian organizations and, of course, the tribes themselves.

Forced removal touched every tribe east of the Mississippi River and several tribes to the west of it. In total, about 100,000 American Indians were removed from their eastern homelands to western reservations.

But the most pernicious land grab was yet to come.

Map showing tribes displaced from the eastern U.S.
Eastern Native American tribes that were forced to move west starting in the 1830s. Smithsonian, CC BY-ND

The General Allotment Act

Even after Indians were corralled on reservations, settlers pushed for more access to western lands. In 1871, Congress formally ended the policy of treaty-making with Indians. Then, in 1887, it passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act. With this law, U.S. policy toward Indians shifted from separation to assimilation – forcibly integrating Indians into the national population.

This required transitioning tribal structures of communal land ownership under a reservation system to a private property model that broke up reservations altogether. The General Allotment Act was designed to divvy up reservation lands into allotments for individual Indians and open any unallotted lands, which were deemed surplus, to non-Indian settlement. Lands could be allotted only to male heads of households.

Under the original statute, the U.S. government held Indian allotments, which measured roughly 160 acres per person, in trust for 25 years before each Indian allottee could receive clear title. During this period, Indian allottees were expected to embrace agriculture, convert to Christianity and assume U.S. citizenship.

In 1906, Congress amended the law to allow the secretary of the interior to issue land titles whenever an Indian allottee was deemed capable of managing his affairs. Once this happened, the allotment was subject to taxation and could immediately be sold.


A 2021 study estimated that Native people in the U.S. have lost almost 99% of the lands they occupied before 1800.

Legal cultural genocide

Indian allottees often had little concept of farming and even less ability to manage their newly acquired lands.

Even after being confined to western reservations, many tribes had maintained their traditional governance structures and tried to preserve their cultural and religious practices, including communal ownership of property. When the U.S. government imposed a foreign system of ownership and management on them, many Indian landowners simply sold their lands to non-Indian buyers, or found themselves subject to taxes that they were unable to pay.

In total, allotment removed 90 million acres of land from Indian control before the policy ended in the mid-1930s. This led to the destruction of Indian culture; loss of language as the federal government implemented its boarding school policy; and imposition of a myriad of regulations, as shown in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” that affected inheritance, ownership and title disputes when an allottee passed away.

A measure of justice

Today, about 56 million acres remain under Indian control. The federal government owns title to the lands, but holds them in trust for Indian tribes and individuals.

These lands contain many valuable resources, including oil, gas, timber and minerals. But rather than acting as a steward of Indian interests in these resources, the U.S. government has repeatedly failed in its trust obligations.

As required under the General Allotment Act, money earned from oil and gas exploration, mining and other activities on allotted Indian lands was placed in individual accounts for the benefit of Indian allottees. But for over a century, rather than making payments to Indian landowners, the government routinely mismanaged those funds, failed to provide a court-ordered accounting of them and systematically destroyed disbursement records.

In 1996, Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, filed a class action lawsuit seeking to force the government to provide a historic accounting of these funds and fix its failed system for managing them. After 16 years of litigation, the suit was settled in 2009 for roughly US$3.4 billion.

The settlement provided $1.4 billion for direct payments of $1,000 to each member of the class, and $1.9 billion to consolidate complex ownership interests that had accrued as land was handed down through multiple generations, making it hard to track allottees and develop the land.

“We all know that the settlement is inadequate, but we must also find a way to heal the wounds and bring some measure of restitution,” said Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians, as the organization passed a resolution in 2010 endorsing the settlement.

Who are the wolves?

“Killers of the Flower Moon” offers a snapshot of American Indian land theft, but the full history is much broader. In one scene from the movie, Ernest Burkhart – an uneducated white man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who married an Osage woman and participated in the Osage murdersreads haltingly from a child’s picture book.

“There are many, so many, hungry wolves,” he reads. “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” It’s clear from the movie that the town’s citizens are the wolves. But the biggest wolf of all is the federal government itself – and Uncle Sam is nowhere to be seen.The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.