My review of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has been published in the Michigan Law Review. You can download the paper here or here.

An excerpt:

Killers of the Flower Moon will be an eye-opener for those who are not aware of what it means for the United States to shirk its duties to Indian people. Osage people alive today are direct victims of the Osage Reign of Terror (pp. 280–91). Grann’s book tells an interesting story about the early days of the FBI, the development of early criminal investigation techniques, and the slow death of frontier injustice and corruption. It is a story ripe for a suspenseful and entertaining film. But Killers of the Flower Moon could be so much more. For whatever reason—be it the fame of the author, the focus on major American historical figures like J. Edgar Hoover, or the fact that the FBI is investigating the current president—Grann’s work has the attention of much of the American public. Killers of the Flower Moon should be a call to action for the United States to take its duty of protection seriously, but instead the stories of real American Indian lives are a framing mechanism for a true-crime FBI story. Indian tribes standing against the political winds that threaten the trust relationship, the duty of protection the ancestors negotiated for in the nineteenth century, deserve more. The thousands of American Indian women who suffer sexual assaults every year and the thousands of American Indian children who witness and suffer violence every year deserve much more.

Continuing thanks to Wilson Pipestem and Alex Skibine.