Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new book review! For this review, I get into Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, a historical true crime book set in the 1920’s. Set in Oklahoma the book follows the history behind the Osage Nation’s wealth, and the string of gruesome murders that followed. Further exploring the newly created FBI’s involvement in catching the murderer, the book focuses on the apparent racism that still continues to this day towards Indigenous communities in North America.
My Review
Being Canadian, I am very aware of the treatment of Indigenous people in Canada and the history behind it. I can’t say I am as well versed in the history in America but as far as I knew it was quite similar to how things rolled here in Canada. After reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gunn, I can say our histories are fairly similar. While I am not aware of any Nation in Canada obtaining such wealth as the Osage, the racism, discrimination, and just overall horrifying treatment white people have towards Indigenous people is very similar in the USA and Canada. I really enjoyed reading this book and getting to learn a bit more about the history of an area I am not from.
I don’t want to retell too much of Killers of the Flower Moon because it’s honestly just such a fantastic book, and is something that honestly is so shocking that it’s real, that I really think more people need to know this type of history. I also really appreciated how this book was put together and felt like David did a really good job of telling this story in a way that was accurate and respectful, but still extremely interesting. Overall I gave Killers of the Flower Moon an 8.5/10 rating. I was struggling between rating it a 9 and an 8.5, and what pulled me more to the 8.5 was I found a few of the parts that focused more on the FBI to be a bit boring. I appreciated some of the history of the bureau that’s shared, but some of it felt a bit like a drag. I just wanted to get back to the main plot of what was going on at Osage Nation. I did appreciate the part that the FBI played in helping everything come together but surprisingly I just found them to be the lesser interesting parts. I say surprisingly because I am a huge John Douglas fan so I thought I would be a bit more pulled in on the FBI parts. They definitely are not all bad just some were a bit slow.
Something I really appreciated about the book was that photos were shown throughout the book. There were photos of the different people that show up in the story, photos of the landscape, and the area. It just added this really interesting element to the book that made it hit a bit harder than other true crime books have for me. There are lots of true crime books out there that have that glossy middle piece that shows photos, and don’t get me wrong those are great, but this was just different. Photos are shown in the pages of the story, and it just adds something different. Getting to see the faces of Mollie and her family made what happened to them all the more real. I am not saying that this story wouldn’t have been as effective if there weren’t photos in the book, but I think there is something to be said about getting to see the faces of those affected while reading what happened to them.
I enjoyed that this book really showed a raw and accurate representation of how white settlers have treated Indigenous people in the past, and how white people continue to treat them this same way to this day. In the early 1900s, Indigenous people were pushed to sign treaties or were forcefully placed on plots of land that were supposed to be theirs to do with what they wanted in exchange (except they really couldn’t) for essentially everything else. When the Osage Nation discovered that their reserve held gallons of rich oil, they allowed sellers to extract the liquid gold to sell in exchange for a cut of the profit. This made the reserve and its people insanely wealthy. The people deserved every last drop of the money, but as one would guess the white man was none too happy that Indigenous people were more wealthy than they were. The anger further bubbled up from the fact that realistically it was their own doing. If they hadn’t forced them to be on a plot of land in which really they only had a say over that land, they could have had the wealth all for themselves. As one can further assume, even though the white rich men had little ability to get the Osage wealth for themselves, they still found ways to get as much as they could. Just seeing how blatant the discrimination, racism, and stereotyping that went on in the 1920s is still around today is a testament to the importance of knowing the history behind the treatment of specific communities in North America.
It’s so disheartening to know how many lives were destroyed because white people saw them as expendable. I am glad that this book was able to give the victims a bit of a voice even all these years later. The Osage people were killed because they were wealthy, happy, and Indigenous, there were no other reasons. If they were poor and sad, the white men would have never infiltrated the reserve in this way. I thought the role that the FBI played in this book was an important one, and a really interesting one. I appreciated that even though it’s clear they played a role in helping find who was killing the Osage people David doesn’t shy away from showing the dark side of the FBI team members. While some people did have good aspects, others did not. This doesn’t take away from the role they played in solving the crime, but this fact mustn’t hide that some of these people were just as racist and stereotypical as the people they were hunting. There were some kind parts though in which players in the story definitely do uplift each other, and given the time frame times like these were really nice to see.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but after reading the book I definitely would like to check it out. I think this book is a great read, and the way it is told is so riveting this is definitely a hard book to put down. This is a piece of history that’s definitely hard to read, but one that I think is important to know, even if it just educates you a bit more about the history of the treatment of Indigenous people by white people.
I hope you enjoyed this review! Have you read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann before or seen the movie? What did you think?
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