Dawes Act

• White settlers targeted members of the Osage Nation to steal their land and the riches beneath it.
• From the early 1800s through the 1930s, official U.S. policy displaced thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homes through the policy known as Indian removal.
• But it failed to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what they were due.
• From my perspective, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is just one chapter in a much larger story: The U.S. was built on stolen lands and wealth.

Westward expansion and land theft

• In fact, hundreds of Native nations already lived on those lands, each with their own unique forms of government, culture and language.
• In the early 1800s, eastern cities were growing and dense urban centers were becoming unwieldy.
• But the most pernicious land grab was yet to come.

The General Allotment Act

• Then, in 1887, it passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act.
• With this law, U.S. policy toward Indians shifted from separation to assimilation – forcibly integrating Indians into the national population.
• The General Allotment Act was designed to divvy up reservation lands into allotments for individual Indians and open any unallotted lands, which were deemed surplus, to non-Indian settlement.
• Once this happened, the allotment was subject to taxation and could immediately be sold.

Legal cultural genocide

• Indian allottees often had little concept of farming and even less ability to manage their newly acquired lands.
• Even after being confined to western reservations, many tribes had maintained their traditional governance structures and tried to preserve their cultural and religious practices, including communal ownership of property.
• In total, allotment removed 90 million acres of land from Indian control before the policy ended in the mid-1930s.

A measure of justice

• The federal government owns title to the lands, but holds them in trust for Indian tribes and individuals.
• These lands contain many valuable resources, including oil, gas, timber and minerals.
• But rather than acting as a steward of Indian interests in these resources, the U.S. government has repeatedly failed in its trust obligations.
• After 16 years of litigation, the suit was settled in 2009 for roughly US$3.4 billion.

Who are the wolves?

• “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” It’s clear from the movie that the town’s citizens are the wolves.
• But the biggest wolf of all is the federal government itself – and Uncle Sam is nowhere to be seen.