2023-10-21 09:30:23
The new film by director Martin Scorsese, The Moon Killerstells the true story of a series of murders that occurred in the lands of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, United States, in the 1920s.
Based on the meticulous research from 2017 by David Grann, the film delves into the racial and family dynamics that shook Oklahoma to its core when oil was discovered in Osage lands. White settlers attacked members of the Osage Nation to steal them and keep the riches beneath them. But from a historical perspective, this crime is just the tip of the iceberg.
From the early 19th century until the 1930s, official U.S. policy displaced thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homes through what were known as “indian transfers”. And throughout the 20th century, the federal government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural resources such as timber, oil and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to disburse to land owners. But did not account for these trust funds for decades, much less paying the Indians what they were owed.
I am director of Indigenous Governance Program from the University of Arizona and law professor. My ancestry is Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee on my father’s side and Puebloan on my mother’s side. From my point of view, The Moon Killers It is just one chapter in a much larger story: America was built on stolen land and wealth.
Members of the Osage Nation attend the premiere of The Moon Killers on September 27, 2023, in New York. Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
According to the traditional version, the American West was populated by industrious settlers who eked out a living, formed cities, and eventually created states. In reality, hundreds of native nations already lived on those lands, each with their own forms of government, culture and language.
By the early 19th century, eastern cities were growing and dense urban centers were becoming unmanageable. Western Indian lands were an attractive target, but expansion there ran into what would become known as “the Indian problem.” This very used phrase It reflected the belief that the United States had a divine mandate to colonize North America, and the Indians stood in the way.
In the early 19th century, treaty-making between the United States and Indian nations shifted from a cooperative process to a tool to forcibly remove tribes from their lands.
Beginning in the 1830s, Congress pressured Eastern Indian tribes to sign treaties that forced them to move to reservations in the west. This took place despite the objections of public figures such as Pioneer and Tennessee Congressman Davy Crocketthumanitarian organizations and, of course, the tribes themselves.
The forced removal affected all tribes east of the Mississippi River and several tribes west of it. Total, about 100,000 American Indians were expelled from its eastern lands to western reserves.
But the most pernicious land grab was yet to come.
Eastern Native American tribes who were forced to move west beginning in the 1830s. Smithsonian, CC BY-ND
Even after the Indians were corralled into reservations, settlers pushed for greater access to western lands. In 1871, Congress formally ended the policy of making treaties with the Indians. Later, in 1887, he approved the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act. With this law, American policy toward the Indians moved from separation to assimilation, that is, the forced integration of Indians into the national population.
This required changing the tribal structures of communal land ownership under a reservation system to a private property model that dissolved the reservations completely. The General Allotment Act was designed to divide reservation lands into allotments for individual Indians and open up unallocated lands, which were considered surplus, to non-Indian colonization. Land could only be awarded to the male heads of the family.
Under the original statute, the U.S. Government held the Indian allotments, which measured approximately 160 acres per person (just over half a square kilometer), in trust for 25 years before each Indian allotment could receive clear title. During this period, it was expected that the Indians awarded They dedicated themselves to agriculture, converted to Christianity, and assumed American citizenship..
In 1906, Congress amended the law to allow the Secretary of the Interior to issue property titles as long as an Indian allotment holder was deemed capable of managing his affairs. Once this occurred, the allotment became subject to taxes and could be sold immediately.
The allotment Indians often had little knowledge of agriculture 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 attempted to preserve their cultural and religious practices, including communal ownership of property. When the U.S. government imposed an alien system of ownership and management on them, many Indian landowners simply sold their land to non-Indian buyers or found themselves subject to taxes they could not pay.
In total, the award eliminated 90 million acres of land (about 364,200 square kilometers) of Indian control before the policy ended in the mid-1930s. This led to the destruction of Indian culture, the loss of the language when the federal government implemented its boarding school policy and to the imposition of a myriad of rules, as shown in The Moon Killerswhich affected inheritance, ownership and title disputes when a successful bidder died.
1917 map of oil leases on the Osage Reservation. HUM Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In actuality there are about 56 million acres (about 226,623 km²) 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, such as oil, gas, timber, and minerals. But instead of acting as steward of Indian interests in these resources, the US government has repeatedly breached its fiduciary obligations.
Under the General Allotment Law, money earned from oil and gas prospecting, mining, and other activities on adjudicated Indian lands was deposited into individual accounts for the benefit of the allotment Indians. But for more than a century, instead of making payments to Indian owners, the government mismanaged those funds, failed to account for them under court order, and systematically destroyed disbursement records.
In 1996, Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfoot Nation of Montana, filed a class-action lawsuit to force the government to historically account for those funds and fix its broken management system. After 16 years of litigation, the lawsuit is settled in 2009 for about 3.4 billion dollars.
The agreement provided for $1.4 billion for direct payments of $1,000 to each member of the group, and $1.9 billion to consolidate the complex ownership interests that had accumulated as the land was passed down from generation to generation, which toward difficult to track successful bidders and develop land.
“We all know that the agreement is inadequate, but we must also find a way to heal the wounds and achieve some measure of restitution,” said Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians, when the organization passed a resolution in 2010 in which he supported the agreement.
Elouise Cobell shakes hands with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a Senate hearing on the $3.4 billion Cobell v. Salazar settlement. Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, led the lawsuit against the federal government for mismanagement of revenue derived from trust lands for Indian tribes and individuals. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The Moon Killers offers a snapshot of the theft of land from the American Indians, but the full story is much larger. In one scene from the film, Ernest Burkhart – an uneducated white man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who married an Osage woman and participated in the Osage murders– reads haltingly from an illustrated children’s book.
“There are many hungry wolves,” he reads. “Can you find the wolves in this drawing?” In the film it is clear that the citizens of the town are the wolves. But the biggest wolf of all is the federal government itself, and Uncle Sam is nowhere to be found.
#theft #land #natives