I just finished reading the 2015 novel Mean Spirit by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, about the murders of Osage tribal members by whites who were greedy for the oil underneath Osage tribal land. The novel seemed to follow the historical facts (as related in Killers of the Flower Moon) fairly closely.
One major insight from this novel was the all-consuming and impatient greed of the white people. They manipulated the Osage natives into giving up nearly all of the rights to their land, so that in the end the whites would have had all of the oil revenues. But this was not good enough. In addition to manipulating the Osages, the whites (especially William Hale) also murdered many of them, in order to get the oil revenues right away rather than waiting to get them by inheritance. They would not have done this, I believe, if the victims had been white.
Much of the prose in Hogan’s novel is beautiful, but one line stood out for me. Natives, at least when they are part of their traditional cultures, seem to be more closely attuned to the patterns of nature, as opposed to whites for whom nature is just a place to find resources and profit. Hogan wrote, “Bees are like Indians…with a circular dance, working together for the survival of the next generations.”
