The US Was Built on Stolen Lands and Wealth

Saturday - October 21 2023, 23:27 UTC - 1 year ago

Director Martin Scorsese's new movie, "Killers of the Flower Moon," tells the true story of a string of murders on the Osage Nation's land in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The US was built on stolen lands and wealth that was taken from Native Americans. Starting in the 1830s, the US government placed pressure on Native American tribes to remove them from their ancestral homes in the east to reservations in the west, and the General Allotment Act of 1887 sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into the national population by transitioning communal systems of land ownership.

Director Martin Scorsese’s new movie, "Killers of the Flower Moon," tells the true story of a string of murders on the Osage Nation’s land in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Based on David Grann’s meticulously researched 2017 book, the movie delves into racial and family dynamics that rocked Oklahoma to the core when oil was discovered on Osage lands. White settlers targeted members of the Osage Nation to steal their land and the riches beneath it .

But from a historical perspective, this crime is just the tip of the iceberg. 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. And throughout the 20th century, the federal government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural resources like timber, oil and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to disburse to the land’s owners .

But it failed to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what they were due.I am the manager of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Governance Program and a law professor. My ancestry is Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee on my father’s side and Taos Pueblo on my mother’s side. 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 theftIn the standard telling, the American West was populated by industrious settlers who eked out livings from the ground, formed cities and, in time, created states. 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 .

Indian lands in the west were an alluring target – but westward expansion ran up against what would become known was "the Indian problem." This widely used phrase reflected a belief that the U.S. had a God-given mandate to settle North America, and Indians stood in the way.Starting in the 1830s, Congress pressured Indian tribes in the east to sign treaties that required the tribes to move to reservations in the west .

This took place over the objections of public figures such as Tennessee frontiersman and congressman Davy Crockett, humanitarian organizations and, of course, the tribes themselves.Forced removal touched every tribe east of the Mississippi River and several tribes to the west of it. In total, about 100,000 American Indians were removed from their eastern homelands to western reservations.But the most pernicious land grab was yet to come .

The General Allotment ActEven after Indians were corralled on reservations, settlers pushed for more access to western lands. In 1871, Congress formally ended the policy of treaty-making with Indians. 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 .

This required transitioning tribal structures of communal land ownership to individual allotments. Any Indian who received an allotment, and then lived on it for five years, would receive full U.S. citizenship.