Evan D. Bernick (Northern Illinois University – College of Law) has posted We the Killers: The Law of Settler Violence and Native Persistence Beyond 'Flower Moon' (34 Pages Posted: 27 Dec 2023) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
"Killers of the Flower Moon" will not soon be forgotten by anyone who encounters it. David Grann’s book and Martin Scorsese’s film tell a story of horrific anti-Indigenous violence with which Americans must reckon. This Essay is about what both Killers leave out about anti-Indigenous violence, the persistence of Native nations and peoples, and American law—and why the omissions matter.
Few directors put more physical violence on screen than Scorsese, and his Killers is characteristically brutal. In this it is faithful to Grann’s essential history of the Osage Reign of Terror—a mass-murder conspiracy that claimed the lives of countless citizens of the Osage Nation during the 1920s. This is a story of shooting, bombing, beating, and poisoning, by people who looked at the Osage and their land as obstacles to be eliminated and resources to be extracted.
But there is more to the story. More and different kinds of violence, more killers, more Native resistance. And a great deal of this violence, killing, and resistance was and is enacted and structured through and by law. American law follows and facilitates settler colonialism, consisting in the removal, dispossession, and political domination of Native peoples, to the end of their elimination as peoples. It has also been shaped, resisted, and evaded in ways that make apparent that Native peoples are not helpless victims of settler-colonial violence. And non-Native readers and viewers of Killers have more to do by way of solidarity in the face of this ongoing violence than to acknowledge their settler privilege.