Mean Spirit

by Linda Hogan

A Review by Dwight A. Moody

The movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” hit theaters a few weeks ago with great fanfare, but promptly died. Perhaps because it is three and a half hours long. It is based on a book, but more than one person wrote in their obituary of the film some version of this, “The better book is Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan. She is Indian and a much better writer.”

I bought the book. It took me much longer than three and a half hours to warm up to this novel. The one thing I tried to do halfway through the 371-page book was sort out all the characters. It was hard to keep them all straight: Nola, Michael Horse, Ruth and John Tate, Grace Blanket, Lila Blanket, Moses, John Stink, and a dozen others, at least. Some had two names, and that didn’t help; but it was because this is a story about Osage Indians, in Oklahoma, along the Blue River, centered in a town called Watona. The year was 1922 and also 1923.

The book ends with a house exploding. The reader is never told who, or why, or how. But that is consistent with not only the book as a whole but also with the sad story of the Osage people. Both this book and the more popular Flower Moon book describe in disgusting detail the prejudice against the Osage and also the history of their unjust treatment at the hands of federal and state agents and other local white people.

We Americans have a long history of denigrating minority populations—not just the native tribes who populated the entire land mass before and after the invasion of European people, but also the Africans brought to America and enslaved, later European ethnic groups that immigrated to what they understood to be a land of promise, and in more recent years, Americans of color from south of the border. This book is just one story, one sad story of the mistreatment of a people.

In this case, the narrative revolves around oil. As it was discovered, often accidentally, on land owned by Osage people, others appeared to swindle them out of it. Some of this swindling was legal, the abuse of laws meant to help rather than harm; some of it was illegal—the murder of people so as to seize either land or money.

The story leads gradually to two trials, one state and one federal, before the anticlimactic explosion of the house on the last pages of the book. The explosion is a piece of the story that does not reveal much—which is why I have mentioned it—and it follows the pattern of the trials: inconclusive, frustratingly inconclusive.

What the narrative does is open up to people like me the compelling but complicated world of the Osage people, especially their feeling for the land, their singing and praying in the old ways, and their struggle to live half old, half new, part white and part brown, a member of a tribe and citizen of a country.

“On his way to the ceremony, Moses walked past the revivalist’s green tent. Pentecostal preachers appealed to the lost, cash-filled Indian souls who had been suffering from spiritual malnutrition. Inside the tent, the faithful prayed with closed eyes. Oil lanterns burned through the green canvas walls, so that from a distance the tent looked luminous, like an emerald, and the mostly mixed-blood people inside were sweating and weeping and wiping their eyes with white handkerchiefs. It was here, in religion, that all their sorrow came out. Moses could hear the Indian preacher speak, ‘And when the spirit touches us, there won’t be any more danger here on earth,’ said the evangelist. ‘No mean spirits walking this land, no smallness in people, no heartaches, no sorrow, nor any pain.’ Moses knew the man’s arms were raised up before the sad adults, and he heard the congregation cry out, ‘Amen,’ and in that word they were bound togethers” (69-70).

The white man religion exemplified by this tent revival scene, as well as that embodied by the Indian Baptist Church and the Catholic Church (and their ministers) gradually fades in this narrative in favor of the traditional spirituality of the Osage people. Slowly, surely the Osage responded to the mysteries of the murders as well as the appeal of the alcohol by moving ever so slowly away from town back toward their traditional homes.

“In the middle of black winter trees, Stace sat down on a stone, and he prayed to the old ones and to the little spotted eagle. ‘I want peace,’ he said out loud. He offered his pipe to the south.  He began to feel strengthened in his mission to help the people…. I have prepared a pipe for you,’ Stace said to the deep winter air. He held the pipe up toward the north. He could see his own breath…. He offered the pipe to the east” (202f).

There are few if any resolutions in this richly detailed story of life and love, deceit and death. But there is revelation, in every sense of the word. And it was this that kept me reading, slow at first, until the last hundred pages, whose reading time was about the same as the first ten. That’s how engrossed I became in this sad, splendid story.