In recent weeks conversations I have had with a filmmaker friend and a historian turned my reading towards Native Americans. In their professional lives, each had researched aspects of Native American culture; the first making a film about its current state and the second uncovering silenced pasts. At the same time, my own research has been contrasting literary expression with non-fiction forms of writing like history and journalism. The goal of my research is to better define the purpose literature serves. What does it contribute to our lives that other forms of writing cannot? These unrelated strands -conversations and research- brought me first to the novel There There and then to the non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon.
The novel is about modern Native American life in the Oakland area. The characters are urban Indians. There are twelve of them, with very different lives, but all moving towards a powwow. Their day to day is not easy and as their collective representation forms into a profile of a community, all are informed -sometimes directly, at other moments subtly- by their experiences as Native Americans. Killers of the Flower Moon, on the other hand, is a book about the past. Specifically, it explores a series of murders that took place outside Tulsa, Oklahoma in the first half of the twentieth century. The victims were Osage Indians and the motive was to steal their ownership rights to oil-rich land. As background, both texts represent the US’s racism -personal and systematic- and hundreds of years of exploitation of Native Americans. Taken together, the non-fiction book provides context that helps explain the novel’s bleakness.
Both books were excellent. At once they brought me to new information about the tensions between fiction and non-fiction while also, more importantly, helping me to better perceive Native American voices from both the past and the present.
The novel is about modern Native American life in the Oakland area. The characters are urban Indians. There are twelve of them, with very different lives, but all moving towards a powwow. Their day to day is not easy and as their collective representation forms into a profile of a community, all are informed -sometimes directly, at other moments subtly- by their experiences as Native Americans. Killers of the Flower Moon, on the other hand, is a book about the past. Specifically, it explores a series of murders that took place outside Tulsa, Oklahoma in the first half of the twentieth century. The victims were Osage Indians and the motive was to steal their ownership rights to oil-rich land. As background, both texts represent the US’s racism -personal and systematic- and hundreds of years of exploitation of Native Americans. Taken together, the non-fiction book provides context that helps explain the novel’s bleakness.
Both books were excellent. At once they brought me to new information about the tensions between fiction and non-fiction while also, more importantly, helping me to better perceive Native American voices from both the past and the present.
