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© 2023 AFPNew film on historical Native American murders reflects universal themes: Scorsese
By Nicolas REVISE NEW YORK©2023 GPlusMedia Inc.
40 Comments
Thuban
The natives of Osage Nation can claim that their sovereign lands were taken from them illegally by military force.
AlternativeOpinion
Yes you can Thuban. Every colonized land has a similar painful story. Russia has harvested it’s fair share of sorrow too.
JeffLee
This wasn't the case at all. The US government had allotted each Osage member around 650 acres of land, for which they would receive royalties on oil and other resources on developed their lands.
After oil was discovered, the Osage became very wealthy, reputed as "the wealthiest nation on earth" at the time. This incident was about a group of businessmen who wanted to grab some of that wealth for themselves.
Four of them were convicted, and Congress in 1925 passed a law stating that the wealth could not be inherited by non-Osage, such as white spouses.
u_s__reamer
A little-known dark and dirty story of money and murders told in a gripping book that can make the reader shed tears of rage. I only hope Scorsese does justice to the book and t the victims in this cruel and sordid page from the "Black Book" of the American Holocaust.
OnTheTrail
Native Americans were betrayed time and time again by the US government. A historical testimony on how far someone should trust that government.
opheliajadefeldt
Lest we forget, the worst of the worst European colonists started and committed all these atrocities in the USA, although it was not called that back then. But even when the USA was formed the atrocities did not cease, but were carried out against the indigenous tribes and black slaves for hundreds of years. Yes, hundreds of years, that is how disgusting, and vile, and barbarous, European and USA 'real' history is, and it carries on to this very day. European colonialism resulted in millions of murders almost everywhere in the world, the true numbers will never be know. It would be hard to find any country that has not suffered from it.
JeffLee
This wasn't the case. The government set up a legal framework for the Osego by which they received "headrights" for their land, by which they received lucrative royalties on petroleum development.
The dirty deeds were done by "businessmen," who were actually mobsters, who murdered in order to gain those rights. Then Congress responded in 1924 by limiting the rights to Osage so that only they could receive the royalties.
This story is about organized crime, not of govt betrayal, which is why Scorses is doing it.
Fredrik
Many is an understatement. The indigenous of the whole continent were basically wiped out by European settlers. Though, most by respiratory diseases brought by the europeans, rather than by firearms.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Yes, because this never happened ANYWHERE else on earth. (eyeroll)
TaiwanIsNotChina
And yet the US doesn't have a record of eliminating 10 million in the Pacific War. Go figure.
mrtinjp
The US government had allotted each Osage member around 650 acres of land..
And what was the US government doing in that land, that was not there land in the first place..,all they did was subtly promote these mobsters businessmen..
JeffLee
"In the first place," it wasn't Osage land either. The tribe was known to inhabit river areas in today's Ohio and Mississippi regions, until the Iroquois invaded their territories, around the 16th century.
To a large extent, figuring out how the Osage could financially benefit from their new homeland.
Wesley
So, basically a Native American version of his other film, KUNDUN.
Wesley
I do hope it's not going to be another anti-white movie.
bass4funk
As tragic as it all was historically, the US was NOT the first nation to take land away from another sovereign nation, it was how land was accumulated and was seen as justifiable in the name of territory expansion.
Exactly.
Peter Neil
”Your honor, my client is not the first to steal and it’s justifiable as property expansion.”
bass4funk
IF you want to call it that.
Paustovsky
Bypassing the sheer frailty of that sentiment, that would make a damn good movie.
An all-native American cast with the history of the US completely reversed.
Some actors of course would be required to whiteface and they would portray whiny-voiced savages, raping and pillaging pure spirit-fearing, law abiding Native Americans who are rapidly stealing all the white peoples homeland and forcing them onto reservations.
asdfgtr
Early America did take chattel slavery to new perverse heights, treating slaves as effectively breedable, valuable livestock instead of just working war prisoners and criminals and debtors to death and then getting new ones to replace them. But that's just what Americans do as a people. They take what other people are doing, add their own weirdness to it, and crank it up to eleven
Wesley
What makes you think they were actually "Americans"......and not a certain tribe that has blended in with them so well that you cannot really tell them apart?
Hint: Who owns the banks? You think they amassed so much wealth overnight?
It was done over generations.
And if Americans are so bad, why do so many people want to become them and enjoy what they have created?
Wesley
I'm not wrong. As Scorsese says, KUNDUN is a universal theme because Tibetans were and still are, being murdered by the chiNazis. Some, including young girls and nuns, simply for having a picture of the Dalai Lama in their hands.
Jeremiah
Apparently, from this article, the fact that White men were murdered for the Osage was not covered in this film.
Strangerland
Sounds like a conspiracy. They're clearly against the white man, right?
Mocheake
Scorcese got it right. This is an honest take and the historical aspect is indisputable. I love the U.S., but it has a lot of racism, violence, injustice and thievery against non-whites. We learn from the past, hopefully, and keep striving to make a greater nation.
theFu
Read the book last summer.
There were some things that I found appalling in it, but it was a different time.
Hopefully, we've all learned a bit more to ensure all people have equal rights and control over their lives except in extraordinary situations where mental health is clearly a reason for a conservatorship taking control over personal affairs of adults.
Every country has some terrible things in their history. Learn from those mistakes and ensure they can never happen again.
Most countries have terrible things happening today as well, so our ability to teach morality and truth and empathy is clearly not done.
There is evil in the world. That's fact and sometimes it has to do with people who think they are holy.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Completely unaware statement of the conditions of slavery in the Caribbean where the focus was purely on economic output:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_British_and_French_Caribbean
The US abolished slavery within roughly 30 years of the UK doing so, btw.
asdfgtr
Irrelevant straw man. Your link mentions nothing about slave breeding. Slavery in the Carribbean does not excuse America of developing the heinous concept of slaves as breedable, valuable livestock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States
*Slave breeding** was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their profits.[1] It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children.[1] The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.[2]*
Systematic breeding of slaves often forced incest upon slave families. Slaves were "given hoods or bags over their heads to keep them from knowing who they were having forced sex with. It could be someone they know, perhaps a niece, aunt, sister, or their own mother. The breeders only wanted a child that could be sold."[12] This disturbing practice naturally broke the psyche of slave families as this forced incest tainted the boundaries they kept with family.
The historian E. Franklin Frazier, in his book The Negro Family, stated that "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock."[citation needed] Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."[13]
The slaves were managed as chattel assets, similar to farm animals. Slave owners passed laws regulating slavery and the slave trade, designed to protect their financial investment. The enslaved workers had no more rights than a cow or a horse, or as famously put by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, "they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect".
TaiwanIsNotChina
I guess this is an introduction to your post because yours is exactly nothing but that.
Conditions were so bad in the Caribbean that they couldn't even do what you obsessed about because the slaves were dying so fast. If you don't think the plantations in the Caribbean tried the same thing between 1807 and 1838 when the trade was illegal but not the practice, you are deluding yourself. I realize you hate the US but you are going to have to find something actually unique to the US to complain about.
asdfgtr
Any sources to support your opinion? Thought not.
Mentioning America's history of slave breeding means "you hate the US"?
Laughable ad hominem and a very weak attempt at deflection.
TaiwanIsNotChina
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/170552296
QED
Just because you are able to google logical fallacies doesn't mean you are applying the terms correctly.
asdfgtr
Nothing mentioned about the systematic breeding of slaves for sale and distribution. QED Fail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States
**Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves....***
The function.......was to produce as many slaves as possible for sale and distribution.
Your opinion and further meaningless deflection.
Mentioning America's history of slave breeding means one is "obsessed", "deluding yourself" and "you hate the US"?
Laughable ad hominem arguments.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Well yeah, because you shamelessly ignore the fact that rape is rape just to try and score a point against the US. Well US slavery was adapted to US conditions but contained no more rape than the Caribbean one overseen by Europeans. And the Caribbean one had a lot more death.
"Ad hominem! Ad hominem! Ad hominem!" I believe you are just engaging in just pure nonsense. Doesn't need to have an official name.
asdfgtr
Nope. Another meaningless ad hominem. Rape is rape.
Slave breeding is defined as follows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves. The function.......was to produce as many slaves as possible for sale and distribution.....The slaves were managed as chattel assets, similar to farm animals.
Slaves were "given hoods or bags over their heads to keep them from knowing who they were having forced sex with. It could be someone they know, perhaps a niece, aunt, sister, or their own mother. The breeders only wanted a child that could be sold."
.... "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock." Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/american-slave-coast-a-history-of-the-slavebreeding-industry-by-ned-and-constance-sublette-chicago-lawrence-hill-books-2016-752-pages-3500-hardback/2D423A8A901A972273793ECEF43FC7A0
Presumably all slaveholders profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth (otherwise they would have manumitted them). Indeed, using their definition, all slaveholders could be classified as slave breeders.
[However] Most scholars define slave breeding as the use of barnyard techniques normally associated with animal husbandry. The choice of definitions is important.
If it makes you happy, believe away.
yipyip
Early America was a British colony. So, we got the Brits to thank as they were the ones who started this whole slave trade in North America.
wallace
PK said that too.
yipyip
Britain, the UK, whatever, did that.
Bob Fosse
Well, they copied the Romans. But the ancient Atlanteans started it.
But you know we can’t go past that, the buck you keep passing has to stop somewhere, right ?
TaiwanIsNotChina
No one is passing any bucks. We're just acknowledging the sins that every colonial power and their child countries have to face up to.
yipyip
The Romans were involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and started the slave tradition in Britain?
I can see why you believe in Atlantis.
https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/the-slave-trade-and-abolition/sites-of-memory/slave-traders-and-plantation-wealth/britain-and-the-slave-trade/
kintsugi
Wales was known for its iron, wool and copper, all of which were often made into items that were traded for slaves or used in the slave ships.
https://blog.library.wales/wales-and-the-slave-trade/
Following the union of parliaments in 1707, Scotland gained formal access to the transatlantic slave trade. Scottish merchants became increasingly involved in the trade and Scottish planters (especially sugar and tobacco) began to settle in the colonies, generating much of their wealth through enslaved labour.
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/guides/slavery-and-the-slave-trade#:~:text=Following%20the%20union%20of%20parliaments,their%20wealth%20through%20enslaved%20labour.