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—1 Timothy 6:10
A bowl of steaming human hearts lay in the great stone goblet of the Chacmool. Moments ago, priests had slaughtered the men to whom they belonged, tossing their corpses, as was tradition, down the flight of the temple steps. Some of these victims would be eaten, others flayed, their skins worn by clergymen who went around town receiving alms from the people. Motecuhzoma, Huey Tatloni of the Mexica, proudly displayed these events to Hernán Cortés and his Spanish adventurers. In addition to ritual slayings of grown men, the Mexica sacrificed children, after making them cry, in order to appease Tlaloc, the god of the rains.
Viewing a temple alongside Motecuhzoma, wherein four giant idols stood overlooking the bloodstained stones below, Cortés couldn’t hold back his horror any longer. He told the emperor that his people must stop worshipping these gods, that they were in fact demons, that human sacrifice must stop immediately, and that a cross to the true God must be erected on the spot.
Motecuhzoma, in turn, reprimanded Cortés. How dare he speak ill of the gods in their very shrine. The cordiality and friendship between the two men began to fray. What Cortés could not understand was that Tlaloc and the other gods held the universe together. Without them, the rains would be poor, spreading famine; indeed, the very sky might fall and destroy the world. The gods were not benevolent deities; they were mysterious mixes of malice and good, and the delicate peace between them and mankind must be kept at all costs. Human sacrifice ensured that the empire would be victorious in its battles and conquests, that its wealth would grow, and that the gods would abandon the enemies of the Mexica emperor.
What Motecuhzoma could not understand was that these foreigners believed in only one, all-loving, all-powerful God who forbade human sacrifice. This God had distinguished himself in the ancient Near East by desiring not the death of man but his life: “For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51). A shiver must have gone down the spine of any clergymen who encountered these practices, for they would know well that the pagan deity Baal of the Hebrew Bible demanded the sacrifice of children. According to Jewish and Christian tradition, Baal was no god at all, but a major demon, Beelzebuh. This New World seemed as though it were his kingdom, and one that needed the light of Christ.
I light my pipe, offering first its mouthpiece to the One above.
Hey hey! hey hey! hey hey! hey hey!
Grandfather, Great Spirit, you have been always,
and before you no one has been.
There is no other one to pray to but you.
But let us look at the actions of these followers of the one, true, compassionate God. Did they behave with mercy? Did they treat native peoples as children of God the universal Father? We know the answer, and when we consider it, we begin to see Cortés’s reactions to the Mexica religion as hypocrisy. Cortés was, in fact, not above murdering women and children. On more than one occasion, he ordered it wholesale, justifying it by way of “deterrence.” Cortés, alas, was no outlier. Before Cortés ever reached the mainland, the Taino people of the Caribbean, so often described by Spanish chroniclers as a peaceful, gentle people, were abused, enslaved, or murdered by other foreigners. Through overwork and disease, these poor people were all but eliminated in the coming centuries. Francisco Pizarro, famed conqueror of the Inca, tortured and murdered their innocent queen, having arrows driven through her limbs before killing her. The list of Spanish outrages could go on and on. When news of the decimated native populations and poor treatment of the Indians reached Europe, even the emperor and his royal court were mortified.
But these conquistadores claimed to be Christians, men who worshipped the God who definitively banned sacrifice and murder of any kind, the God who told his followers to love their enemies and to do good to those who hated them, the God who gave up his own life for the sake of the lowliest sinner. They inherited a Catholic “just war” tradition, which forbade wars of aggression and conquest. How could this be reconciled with their actions? In actual fact, their deeds often suggested that they worshipped not Christ but Mammon. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:34). Mammon, of course, refers to money and wealth, but the ancient church father Gregory of Nyssa identified Mammon as the name of a demon—indeed, as another name for Baal, who demanded the sacrifice of human lives: “It seems to me that the Lord names the Evil One by many and various titles according to the variations of evil operations. He calls him by many names such as Devil, Beelzebul, Mammon, ruler of the world, murderer of man, Evil One, father of lies.”
Those Europeans, therefore, who murdered and worked to death indigenous or black African peoples were functionally offering pagan sacrifice to the god, or demon, of money. Every slave owner who laid stripes on the back of one of his workers, every gold-hungry settler who killed, abused, or displaced an indigenous person was performing an act of worship to Mammon, the hungry and insatiable representation of greed. There were priests on the very earliest expeditions from Europe who said so. One Dominican friar, Fr. Montesinos, angered the first Spanish adventurers when he told them at Sunday Mass that each of them was in a state of mortal sin for what they were doing to the natives. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the famous bishop and writer and “protector of the Indians,” expressed it repeatedly in strong terms: “The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. . . . Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds.”
That this greed characterized the first encounter between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the American mainland says much, for we know well what the ensuing centuries would hold. From old Tenochtitlan to the mountains of Peru to the Black Hills of South Dakota, European greed would terrorize native peoples.
Grandfather, Great Spirit, lean close to the earth
that you may hear the voice I send.
You, where the sun goes down, behold me;
Thunder Beings, behold me!
Hear me, four quarters of the world—a relative I am!
In saying all this, we must acknowledge everyone involved as a real, full human being. To say that the Europeans were all wicked would be to ignore las Casas, the Spanish Jesuits who developed the modern conception of human rights, and the many others who balked at the greed of their countrymen. It would be to reduce the complexity of everyone involved. At the same time, to portray indigenous people as mere victims would be wrong too. Motecuhzoma’s empire came to power by conquering as brutally as the Europeans did; likewise the Inca. The Sioux came to the Black Hills by violently pushing out the Crow, and they themselves were seeking out new lands after terrible wars with the Ojibwe pushed them west from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Their stories are also, like those of Europeans, much more than just the wars they fought, won, or lost. We must hold to the humanity and agency of all parties, both for good and for ill.
We must hold to the humanity and agency of all parties, both for good and for ill.
The technological advantages of the Europeans, however, meant that it was never a fair fight, and they were able to perpetrate evils on the indigenous peoples on a vastly greater scale. Indeed, Europeans were most often the aggressors, since it was they who came seeking new territory. Ulysses S. Grant acknowledged this precipitating factor in the conflict between the US Army and the Lakota over the Black Hills; it was not brought about by the tribes, but “by the greed and Avarice of the white man.”
You have set the powers of the four quarters
of the Earth to cross each other.
You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties,
and where they meet, that place is holy.
Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things.
Killers of the Flower Moon, the recent film by Martin Scorsese, based on the book of the same title by David Grann, tells one such story of greed. With good reason, both have been much discussed. They tell the tale of a shocking spree of murders in 1920s Oklahoma wherein at least twenty-four (but likely many more) Osage Indians were murdered in cold blood.
In savvy treaty negotiations with the US government, Osage leadership had managed to ensure that they retained mineral rights to their Oklahoma land, even if they did not live on it. This meant that any oil companies wishing to drill into the vast deposits of Oklahoma crude needed to lease the rights from the Osage tribe. Each member of the tribe, therefore, received a headright, a certain percentage of the yearly oil income. The tribe was also able to lobby the government to pass a law that headrights could not be bought.
This made Osages fabulously rich, the richest ethnicity in the world per capita. Osages dressed in the finest clothes, purchased the newest, shiniest cars, and were attended to by teams of white servants. The women went about in pearls and fine jewellery, and the men dressed in sharp European suits.
This conspicuous wealth, however, would soon bring evil to their doorsteps. Rural Oklahoma in the 1920s was under-policed, and white fortune-seekers began to circle like vultures. First, of course, came the oil companies, who duly leased the land from the natives, but then came the scrabble of bootleggers, gangsters, and con men on the make.
Osages began to disappear from “wasting disease” or mysterious fits of apoplexy. Others had car accidents or committed suicide. Each of these reflected the sinister hand of one William Hale, portrayed in the movie by Robert DeNiro, who ably sheds his New York mafioso persona and adopts instead that of a Southern aristocrat. DeNiro’s Hale comes across by turns as pathetic, psychopathic, merciless, clever, and delusional. He hatches a brilliantly devious, years-long scheme to cheat the Osages out of their oil money. And because he is not legally able to buy their headrights, Hale resorts to murder. Using many methods, he deploys a diversity of henchmen to systematically kill Osages while pursuing legal sleights of hand to transfer their headrights to himself.
For all this to be possible, he needed to ingratiate himself with the tribe. At the film’s opening, he is already deeply trusted by them. He has helped to build schools and clinics, loaned money to their families, and even learned their language. One particularly striking scene in the film has Hale pronouncing funereal prayers in the native tongue over the sister of his latest victim.
To make all this work, Hale needs an entire network of co-conspirators. These range from the moonshiners and desperate criminals he pays to do the dirty work to the villainous Shoun brothers, the doctors who abet his every scheme. Those who investigate his crimes are liable to go mysteriously missing and wind up dead in a ravine.
The most vicious of Hale’s conspiracies is the one that occupies the heart of the film. Hale conscripts his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, played by the excellent Leonardo DiCaprio, into his longest scheme yet. Ernest falls in love with, and marries, an Osage woman named Mollie, a relationship Hale encourages with an eye to someday collecting Mollie’s family’s headrights. To that end, he engages in the systematic destruction of her loved ones.
Mollie’s sister, Anna, is shot through the head and dumped in a ditch. Lizzie, the matriarch, is slowly poisoned to death. Rita and her husband Bill are blown up with a nitrous bomb. And Mollie herself is slowly poisoned by tainted insulin administered to her by the Shouns (and, in the film, by Ernest, although there is no evidence that this occurred).
Ernest is complicit in at least the murder of Bill and Rita, working as a go-between in order to commission the bomb maker and assassin. He likewise enables the killing of the melancholic Henry Roan, whom Hale wants dead in order to claim his estate.
DiCaprio’s Ernest is a not-too-bright, greedy young man, easily manipulable by his uncle, whom he calls “King.” An actor sometimes criticized for acting like he’s gunning for an Academy Award, his performance in this film is understated, a deft portrayal of a weak, insinuating man whose greed eventually destroys his own life and the lives of those he loves.
Scorsese, unsurprisingly, has created a beautiful work of moviemaking. The story he tells leaves viewers haunted. Although the movie has a gargantuan run time, it never drags. Lily Gladstone shines as the quietly strong Mollie, and Jesse Plemons plays the humble, brilliant investigator, Tom White, with great subtlety.
Scorsese gives the film focus and cohesion by centring the narrative on the relationship of Mollie and Ernest, which makes for a compelling visual experience. But viewers should be aware it does so at the cost of accuracy.
Ernest is portrayed as a heartless killer, murdering people without compunction and injecting his wife with poison day after day. The real-life Ernest, however, was a dim man who was in thrall to his uncle until facing his own crimes broke the spell. He really did participate in Hale’s twisted killings, but he was not responsible for many of the worst acts the film attributes to him, and he did end up owning his actions. Since the film purports to tell the true story of real people, readers interested in a historical account would do well to consult Grann’s book in addition to watching the film. The true story is plenty wicked without the embellishments. Nonetheless, it is a powerful and affecting film, which, in its broad strokes, tells a story that more people ought to know.
Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather, all over the earth
The faces of living things are all alike.
With tenderness have these come up out of the ground.
One remarkable, true detail in the movie is the fact that Hale frequently invokes God and the Bible. This false Christianity contrasts with the true faith of the Indians and even that of the parish priest, who is Mollie’s trusted confidant and who tips off the investigators. Hale’s hypocritical piety parallels that of the early conquistadores. He worships Christ with his mouth but Baal with his mind and hands.
When Ernest meets Mollie, she asks what religion he is. “Catholic,” he replies hesitantly. “Then why don’t I ever see you in church?” she returns. At Mass, Ernest doesn’t know when to kneel or when to stand. Mollie, who frequently attends church and prays the rosary, at first sees this as endearing, but it foreshadows the duplicity in Ernest’s heart. Hale’s own Bible quoting and references to God, much like his beneficence to the Osage, becomes more disgusting the more his true character is revealed
For the Osage, much of the old ways and Christianity could fit together. They worshipped one God, Wah-Kon-Tah, and in the film, as in life, we see feathers and smoke alongside crosses and incense. Two of the most moving scenes feature native religious tradition. At the film’s opening, there is an emotional, ceremonial burial for the peace pipe. The Osage weep and cry as the old ways are put to rest. The peace pipe is the special means of communication with God and of communion with fellow man. Later in the film, we see Lizzie at her own funeral. From the outside, she is dead, but from her perspective, she is being led by three spiritual figures to the happy hunting grounds of rest.
Authentic religious faith is repeatedly juxtaposed with what I have called the worship of Baal, this perverted inversion of sacred belief and ritual. With the burial of the peace pipe, Baal comes forth out of the ground.
In all this, we must avoid trading one racial essentialism for another. In days of old, whites too often saw the Indian as a lesser-developed race, as savage, or cruel, or drunken, or essentially any number of bad things. We must not now think of white people as essentially greedy, false, and dishonest. Some white men are, but not all. If there are Cortéses and Hales, there are also las Casases and Tom Whites, figures of deep integrity and charity.
At the same time, we must allow ourselves to feel the horrific realities of our past deeply, to recognize that we live in a country whose indigenous population has been attacked, cheated, lied to, stolen from, and murdered since the fateful landing of 1492. We must feel also that these evils reach down into our very own day.
Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice.
At the center of the sacred hoop
With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather,
With running eyes I must say
The tree has never bloomed.
But we must not remain there. American Indians are not the sum of what white people have done to them. They are not the sum of what white people think of them, whether well or poorly. They are not a shibboleth for enabling academics or corporations to gain a clear conscience.
Today we talk more than ever, perhaps, of the historic ills that have befallen American Indians (although more people talked of it in the past than we’d think). But while we talk often, especially in academic and media circles, about how badly these nations have been treated, we spend precious little time talking about native life right now. This avoidance of current realities does two things. First, it reduces native people to a simplified, victim status, when in reality, as one Sioux acquaintance emphasized to me, they are much like other communities, facing their own challenges and their own triumphs. Second, it distracts from the actual, real challenges that face people on many reservations.
Yes, it’s worth knowing about a heinous crime a century ago in Oklahoma, but it is even more worth knowing that American Indians, more than any other group in America, lack access to adequate health care and good-quality food. It is worth knowing that they are the most likely to be poor, to be out of work, to get heart disease and diabetes. They are the most likely to die as infants or to die an early death.
At the same time, native people are more than these problems. If you watch Killers of the Flower Moon, you should know also that the Osage produced two of the greatest ballerinas of all time, Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. Major General Clarence Tinker was an Osage who sacrificed his life for his country in the Pacific theatre in World War II. Jerry C. Elliot High Eagle was an Osage physicist credited with saving the lives of the Apollo 13 crew. You should know that native people have given this country great poets, writers, leaders, artists, spiritual leaders, and chefs, and that their best traditions are still living ones. We must hold in our heads the complexity of things, that American Indians are not reducible to the challenges they face, but that these challenges are nonetheless real.
The fact is that the cruelty done to our Indian brothers and sisters is not over. We must realize that when the US government relocated these people away from their homes, we threw their world into chaos and paved the way for all the difficulties they still face today. Tribes were often given poor farmland and made dependent on government handouts. The breaking of their traditional social structures, ways of living, and roles meant that they were robbed not only of their material well-being but of their dignity. We have created a vicious cycle of poverty, lack of education, underemployment, and broken family life that have kept the American Indian down—not in history, but right this minute.
I don’t pretend to know the high-level policy solutions to these issues, but I know there are things that can be done and that are worth doing to provide better health resources and food access. Any substantive progress on these fronts would be better than the empty, self-congratulatory words and gestures so often offered by “enlightened” whites. The thing is, American Indians represent a dispersed minority and therefore have a limited ability to make sure their priorities are heard in government. Those of us who are not native ought to join our voices to theirs in advocating for more just arrangements.
If we must choose, I’m inclined to choose caretaking, generosity, and peace as American values. At least then we have something to aspire to.
I hope that in reading this, you do not go away thinking that all is well if you simply think the right thoughts about American Indians. I hope you do not walk away with a white saviour complex. I hope you do not walk away indifferent either. It can be hard for non-native people to know how they should respond to the challenges indigenous communities face. We can tie ourselves up in knots over whether we say or think the right things. The cure to this is cultivating human relationships and not just cultivating opinions. Don’t get too caught up in terms or political correctness if these hold you back from being a friend and a neighbour, and be sure that your concern for your brother is not a way to aggrandize yourself, but a means of giving love. I leave it to you to decide how to help any of your neighbours in need, Indian, white, or black, but you ought to be aware that our Indian brothers and sisters were intentionally moved long ago far from the rest of society, where their challenges remain out of sight and out of mind.
Here I stand, and the tree is withered.
Again, I recall the great vision you gave me.
It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.
Is the story of theft and murder at the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon representative of the American experience? I’m cautious about such claims. Is a poor Polish family in Chicago experiencing something like what the exploiters of the Osage experienced? What about a bartender in South Boston or a south Asian motel keeper in Atlanta? What of the black and indigenous people who have helped to shape the country into what it is? Each of these is an American experience. America is home to exploiters and caretakers, to venom and gentleness, to violence and peacemaking, to greed and to generosity. Is any one of these more American than the other, or is this all part of the warp and woof of humanity? If we must choose, I’m inclined to choose caretaking, generosity, and peace as American values. At least then we have something to aspire to.
If there is something uniquely American about this film, it is the dark underbelly of the self-made man. Like Jay Gatsby or Donald Sterling, any poor son of a bitch can make it in America through “self-creation.” For many people, this “self-making” took the form of an honest search to provide a good life for their family, fleeing poverty and oppression in Eastern Europe, Italy, Mexico, or elsewhere. We must not lump all humanity into a single mass. American history is so much more complicated than simple generalizations. Nonetheless, Hale’s story is a warning about the perverted version of the American dream, which makes an idol of wealth and the self, sacrificing its victims on the twisted altar of Baal.
Nourish it then
That it may leaf
And bloom
And fill with singing birds!
Hear me, that the people may once again
Find the good road
And the shielding tree.
Why does the Bible say that money is the root of all evil? Shouldn’t it be pride, or malice, or something like that, instead of a neutral inanimate object? Is money really the root of all evil? I believe that if one contemplates the story of western treatment of American Indians, one can begin to understand this better. I wrote above about how these westerners sacrificed countless lives to the demon Baal, but what is the relationship, exactly, between money and death?
Money is a thing of pure instrumental value. It does not have value in itself, but only as a means to that which can be purchased. Insofar as money keeps its proper place, as ordered toward the purchase of necessities, toward charity, and toward the common good, then all is well. If, however, the mindset we have toward money should begin to infect our relationship to things in the world that do have intrinsic value, then we become the world’s destroyers. This mindset toward money says that all things are instrumental, that nothing has intrinsic and inviolable value. By making everything purchasable, it reduces all things to commodities. If we let this mindset overtake us, the demon Baal possesses us, and begins to consume what is good and holy in our lives. Thus we pierce ourselves with many sorrows.
It is in this context that the human person, who is always a subject, is reduced to a mere object, that the person who is always an end in itself is made a mere tool.
This is why so many suffered and died to procure sugar and cotton, and why they were killed to dig up gold. Men had become worshippers of money. The philosopher Roger Scruton says this is precisely what it means for the world to be fallen: for things to be viewed in monetary terms. “Getting and spending,” Wordsworth said, “we lay waste our powers.” It is in this context that the human person, who is always a subject, is reduced to a mere object, that the person who is always an end in itself is made a mere tool.
Cortés and the conquistadores, having observed the worst behaviours of the people they encountered, were all too ready to reduce those people to something less than human. But in so doing they became what horrified them in others. Those who came after did not even have the excuse that Cortés might have claimed, and they continued for centuries to throw the sons and daughters of God into the charnel that is Baal’s mouth.
Still, throughout all of this shameful brokenness, there are always those who continue to worship the God of love. The great mass of humanity struggles daily between good and evil, as each of us does today. Bartolomé de las Casas and the good priests of Spain spent or lost their lives in the effort to serve and defend the exploited Indians. Simple men like Tom White sought justice on behalf of the silenced. Native leaders like Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow, Standing Bear of the Sicangu, and Red Cloud and Black Elk of the Lakota showed their people hope and a way forward when it felt like the world was ending. From these people we can draw inspiration, and we can pray to Wah-Kon-Tah that we will be like them. If we can really believe that we are relatives under the One Great Spirit, then perhaps, as Black Elk envisioned, all our peoples can come within the sacred hoop and follow the good red road to the day of rest.
Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is!
Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand,
that I may be like You.
With your power only can I face the winds.
Look upon these faces of children without number
and with children in their arms,
that they may face the winds
and walk the good road to the day of quiet.
This is my prayer; hear me!
The voice I have sent is weak,
yet with earnestness I have sent it.
Hear me!
It is finished. Hetchetu aloh!
Amen*
*The excerpted prayers throughout are from Nicholas Black Elk, as recorded in Black Elk Speaks.
