Mean Spirit
by Linda Hogan
Oil under Osage land. White men with plans.
For you if
you want the Osage murders told by a Native writer who understands what was lost beyond the money
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The Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s, after oil was discovered under their land. The US government had assigned each Osage person a headright — a share of the oil revenue. Then the murders started. White men marrying Osage women, then the women dying. Guardianship schemes. A systematic campaign to take the oil wealth by eliminating the people who owned it. Hogan — Chickasaw — writes this history as a novel, giving the Osage their interior lives back. Essential companion to Killers of the Flower Moon.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
- Topics
- osage murders
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Killers of the Flower Moon(2023)
dir. Martin Scorsese
Murder for money, disguised as marriage.
In 1920s Oklahoma, oil wealth makes the Osage Nation targets of a systematic campaign of murder, exploitation, and legalized theft, carried out in part by white men who married into Osage families. Adapted from David Grann's book of the same name.
Why it’s here: Punk in centering Mollie Burkhart's interiority instead of turning her murder into a backdrop for a white antihero's guilt. Pedagogical in showing how legalized guardianship and "headrights" turned bureaucracy itself into a weapon against the Osage.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Independence from Britain. Empire over everyone else.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
Westward expansion, told by the people it destroyed.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Killers of the Flower Moon
David Grann
The richest people in America were being murdered. Nobody stopped it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST