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morningtide 's review for:
challenging
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
“I did not prove who killed my grandmother,” McAuliffe wrote. “My failure was not just because of me, though. It was because they ripped out too many pages of our history....There were just too many lies, too many documents destroyed, too little done at the time to document how my grandmother died.” He added, “A murdered Indian’s survivors don’t have the right to the satisfaction of justice for past crimes, or of even knowing who killed their children, their mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters, their grandparents. They can only guess—like I was forced to.”
I've been reading enough in-depth nonfiction books about American history, and with each one I read I continue to be impressed with the quantity of cruel and atrocious acts we've committed in our short history as a country - and how much of it we don't learn about in our school system. I am no longer surprised at the information, though. We have a cruel, horrible history as the creation and continual development of our country.
There is a denial factor attached to a lot of our history, that those things were a long time ago and we are good now. (They weren't really that long ago; we are not very good still.) As of reading this book in 2022 it has been only 101 years since the Osage Murders 'officially' started. When we learn about massacres of Native Americans during colonial settlement and manifest destiny and all that propaganda, we were taught that it was a part of our past, but of course the past is in the past (but obviously a detrimental factor in building this great country).
When we get to a time in history where we've hit full capitalism oil drilling and cars driving around, it becomes obvious that just because it is no longer "acceptable" to kill Native Americans, it doesn't mean we have stopped, just changed the laws and rules and look the other way when it benefits white people. Considering this is essentially how the FBI was formed, it's interesting how it isn't something I ever heard about in school or American history classes. The necessity for a federal investigative agency being that the local law was corrupt, complicit or at best, indifferent to the murdering of Native Americans highlights that our treatment of non-white people continues to be a core of our country well into modern times.
The main parts of the book string together the history of an Osage family - Mollie Burkhart and her sisters, as well as other select Osage people, and the syndicate of townspeople ruthlessly killing people, with one man as the mastermind. At the end, the author shares additional discoveries in the mystery - there's actually more to it. There are more mysterious deaths, murders, and acquirement of land and fortunes than what was tied to one criminal. In reality, the deaths started before this official "Reign of Terror," and continued after the mystery was solved - because it was not just one leader with a collection of people full of greed and hate that would kill the Osage to steal from them. Multiple guardians, family members, white spouses attained land rights after mysterious, coincidentally high amounts of deaths. Murder was not an unreasonable solution for multiple people.
The striking part is, when the author then reaches back to the living family members and Osage nation members to share these findings, it is not really news to them. They have known or suspected all along the abhorrent crimes against the Osage and those that tried to help them. It is just more of the history we have tried or succeeded in burying.