Friday, June 04, 2021

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


10 comments:

  1. Sounds like this story is aptly titled. I have to admit, it's not a part of our history that I was even aware of before reading your review. There are so many sad chapters in the past, aren't there?

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    1. Those chapters do keep popping up. I had never heard of this atrocity either until I read the nonfiction version a while back. The genocide perpetuated on Native Americans is something that requires self-study - the schools and colleges have not done a very good job on that subject.

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  2. Such a sad story and just another black mark in our history. Although I haven't read this one, I did read Killers of the Flower Moon so was familiar with what happened.

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    1. Killers of the Flower Moon sometimes reads more like a novel than Mean Spirit does, Diane. They tell the same story...all the same facts are in both books...but I found Mean Sprit the more difficult of the two books to read. Mean Spirit's pages are very densely packed - and there lots and lots of characters to keep track of.

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  3. It is an important story. It's unfortunate that the writing is not more compelling but kudos to you for reading it.

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    1. I only discovered it via that Great Courses class on mysteries and thrillers, Dorothy. It was included in the lecture on American Indian mysteries, but it turned out to be very different than what I thought from the lecture I would be reading. It's not really a mystery at all because everyone, including the reader, knows pretty much from the start who is responsible for all the killings and burnings. It does,I suppose, fall more under the "crime fiction" label than under the "mystery" label.

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  4. It is indeed hard reading, because it is a hard and painful thing to acknowledge as part of our history. I had read "Killers of the Flower Moon" with a book group a few years ago, but I just read and then re-read "Mean Spirit" for book group. One of our reasons for reading Hogan's book is that we wanted to read the story from the perspective of an Indigenous author. The second time through I slowed down and appreciated that, even in her prose, Hogan's poetry shines through in some of the painful yet beautiful places.

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    1. Thanks for your comments. We are blessed that writers like Hogan have explored a version of history that has generally been so effectively hidden from what we consider to be the American Experience and history. It took a long time for it all to gain traction, and I'm thankful that the movie came along to strengthen the message and its exposure. I don't hear particularly good things about the movie, but I imagine it's driven many viewers to the Flower Moon book, and maybe even to Hogan's work. And that's a good thing.

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    2. I think the movie has drawn some attention to Hogan’s book. It was out of print when our book group selected it a few months ago. The few used copies got bought up. But then they printed a new edition.

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    3. The copy I read was a very old and tattered one that my county library still had on the shelf. I was surprised it was still there.

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