Turtle Talk

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON IS A STUDY IN GENOCIDAL VILLANY: THE UNITED STATES CONTEMPORARY WAR ON NATIVE AMERICAN SACRED SITES CONTINUES THE RAMPAGES OF THAT ERA.

By what imagined rights does the United States attempt to legitimize its original conquest of Indigenous Peoples and continue to obliterate Native Americans’ Holy Places? In the quest for mineral enrichments–be it oil, copper, lithium, or uranium– how long should we enable and benefit from the sort of genocidal dispossession depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon?

            From first contact between Europeans and Indigenous Peoples, dehumanization of American Indians has been the invention necessary to Colonialism. To this end Spain’s monarchs solicited pontifical decrees, “Papal Bulls.” Popes blessed inherently non-Christian subjugations of “heathens, infidels, and savages,” birthing the Doctrine of Discovery, the notion that cross-Atlantic sea travel somehow conveyed title to “America” to European nations. Pope Francis repudiated this indefensible foundation for White Supremacy earlier this year (link), but its legal and cultural legacies live on, perpetuating the inhumane treatment of Indigenous Peoples so poignantly depicted in Killers.

Founding American myths of the righteousness of conquest and of Manifest Destiny both fed and were propagated by the Marshall Trilogy, the suite of Supreme Court opinions (1823 –1832) at the root of U. S. American Indian Law. The first chief justice, John Marshall, wrote that the courts of the conqueror would not apologize for bringing the benefits of “civilization” to America’s Native Nations. Marshall argued that leaving Native Peoples in possession of their lands and resources would condemn America to a forever wilderness and that solving the “Indian problem” required subordination of Native Americans as “wards of the state.”