The Wanderer

Lately I’ve been obsessed with history. When I was in high school my AP US History teacher, a character to put it lightly, would rage on an on about the importance of studying the past, as history often repeats itself. He was a veteran, and as US History is mainly a history of conquests, it made sense why he would obsess over the greed and brutality of our nation. I never got the hype, for at the end of the day I was taking a class and my main focus was doing well and getting into a good college. So I listened on, half of my mind on other classes and rest on whatever video game I was playing at the time, the words and warnings of his trauma distantly flowing from one ear to the other.

But as I’ve grown older and wiser (well maybe not wiser) I’ve come to find an almost morbid fascination with history. Movies and literature about the world wars that ravaged Europe and the Pacific during the 20th century became some of my all time favorites, movies like All Quiet on the Western Front, Saving Private Ryan, and Hacksaw Ridge forcibly grabbed me from the neck and brought me into a world of chaos and brutality, truly highlighting how terrible humanity can be if pushed to our limits.

So when Killers of the Flower Moon came out, a new Wes Anderson western epic, I found myself fascinated with the concept, even more once I found out it was based on real historical events. I bought the book and finished it in a week.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a historical novel cataloging the rise and fall of the Osage Indians in the 1920s. The Osage, a rich culture that once roamed freely across the great plains of the American west, was in a dire situation in the early 1900s. More and more of their land had been forcefully taken and ripped apart to make way for American development. Soon, the tribe found themselves making a home of the rocky barren landscape of north Oklahoma, with little food and resources and a waning population increasingly surrounded by white settlers. In an attempt to protect the last of their land, the Osages made a deal with the American Government to buy the land and all resources that came with them. What they didn’t know at the time was that they were sitting on top of the largest oil field in North America.

As Oil was struck and miners realized the true extent of their discovery, the Osage began to earn hundreds and thousands of dollars as more and more leases were bought. Oil junkies came from miles to get rich, soon transforming this barren landscape to a western metropolis ripe with all the brilliance that comes with it, as well as the crime. The Osages soon became the wealthiest population per capita in the world, their monthly oil checks skyrocketing from a few hundred dollars to millions overnight.

As riches flooded into the Osage nation almost as fast as the oil flooded out, the American government tried their best to take control of the situation. For decades now the government had been trying to assimilate the Native American population, mainly by force, but now the Osage tribe had the resources to fight for autonomy, creating a gap between sea and shining sea that stood as a boundary, as they saw, between law abiding citizens and the wild west. And then one day, an Osage woman was murdered, and more followed suit.

Killers of The Flower Moon follows the FBI in its infancy and their journey to uncover a heinous plot to rid the Osage Indians of not only their wealth, but their lives. The story, written in an omniscient 3rd person in the form of real accounts and eye witness reports, tells a cautionary tale of greed in its worst form, how a group of individuals corrupted the state of Oklahoma and robbed the Osage of millions of dollars and over 25 lives.

What stayed with me with this story is that it highlights the grim reality of life not only in the wild west but of those forced to stay there, how America has treated Native Americans, and how they continue to disregard and segregate communities only because of their need for autonomy and to live a life outside of the boundaries of white society. Today, we take society as a norm, a way of life that no one in their right mind would choose to leave. But the reality is that this global society has many downfalls, and is built on the suffering of those who don’t abide by the rules. Different ways of life aren’t wrong, they just don’t fit into the society we’ve catered today. Books like Killers of the Flower Moon are important for the reason that they open our eyes to other ways of life, and the importance of diverse thinking in our single minded world. It was a fantastic book and I couldn’t recommend it more.