Mean Spirit - Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan’s 1990 novel Mean Spirit is a fictionalized version of real life events that took place in Oklahoma during the early 1920s after oil was discovered under land owned by members of the Osage Indian tribe. Almost as soon as the oil was discovered, white men schemed to take the newfound wealth for themselves by forcing the Osage families from their homes or by marrying Osage women who held the mineral rights in their own names. Multiple members of the tribe were murdered, and whole families were forced to flee the region in fear of their lives. Even today (this quote is from 1990), according to Hogan, “Non-Indian shareholders still receive Osage Indian annuity checks, shares in the Mineral Trust, and unwarranted benefits as shareholders.” Mean Spirit tells the story of the people from whom the “non-Indians” stole all that money.

The beautiful Grace Blanket never expected to become the richest woman in the entire Oklahoma Territory, but after oil is discovered beneath the otherwise worthless reservation land given to her family by the US government decades earlier, that is exactly what she is. The Blankets have so much money they are running out of things to spend it on — and some of the other Osage families who live near the Blanket family are having the same problem. But that is not the only problem the Osage families have because, unbeknownst to them, the struggling white families living in the nearest town, the various oil men who come to the territory, and the very government agents responsible for protecting the rights of the Osage tribe all want that money for themselves — and some of them will do anything it takes to get their hands on it. 

When members of the tribe start committing “suicide,” dying from “heart attacks,” and otherwise dropping dead all over the reservation, other Indians like the Blankets and the Grayclouds are at first a little slow in realizing just how much danger they are all in. It is only after their pleas for help are ignored by Washington D.C. officials, and the bodycount continues to rise, that they realize they are under a relentless siege by outsiders that will not end until all of the oil money has been stolen from them. The more traditional among them literally pack up and move to the hills where they feel safer; the less traditional families load up all of their belongings and leave the area completely, abandoning their property in the process. 

Linda Hogan tells the story from the points of view of multiple characters who struggle to deal with the reality of what is happening to their family, friends, and neighbors as they are picked off one by one by the scavengers around them. The Indians have no place to turn to for help because even the one agent from Washington who has their best interests at heart, himself an American Indian, is treated by his fellow agents as if he is losing his mind. By the time the Osage get some semblance of justice and protection, it will be way too late. There is no just compensation for murder and theft of this scale when no one really seems to care.

Bottom Line: Mean Spirit is based on a shameful segment of American history that even today too few people know about. It covers the same events that, twenty-seven years later, became the basis of David Grann’s well-received nonfiction book on the same subject, Killers of the Flower Moon. Before writing the novel, Linda Hogan (who is herself a member of the Chickasaw tribe) spoke to people who are still separated from the land that is rightfully theirs because their ancestors fled the area in the middle of the night. The story that Mean Spirit tells is a moving one, but Hogan’s fiction style is somewhat labored and, as a result, the book’s 375 pages do make for slow reading. This one requires patience, but it is well worth the effort.

Linda Hogan