Killers of the Flower Moon: Metaphors 3 key examples

For centuries, European American art and literature has depicted American Indians as all-but-gone from North America. While it is true that European colonization of the continent had a devastating impact on American Indian communities, the trope suggests that these communities were vanishing long before Europeans arrived in their midst. This fiction enabled European Americans and the United States government to rationalize genocidal projects against American Indians. If their communities were always already in decline, the logic goes, genocide doesn't change the outcome.

Grann uses the language of the "vanishing tribe" here to describe Tom White and the community from which he comes. But White is not an American Indian, nor are most of the "frontier lawmen" he feels are passing out of existence. He is a white man faced with a choice: either cling to the old, essentially vigilante way of practicing law enforcement, or move into the future with the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation. Grann goes on to describe how White joins the FBI and obeys many of Hoover's edicts. Still, White also clings to some aspects of his old identity. For instance, he refuses for a time to stop wearing a cowboy hat despite Hoover's wish for all of his agents to dress like East Coast, college-educated elites. This choice echoes Mollie Burkhart's choice to continue wearing some traditional Osage clothing after she is forced to attend Catholic boarding school. By introducing White via the "vanishing tribe" metaphor, Grann emphasizes that this time period in Oklahoma was characterized by major shifts in culture and identity for everyone, not just the Osage.

Grann might fairly be criticized for comparing White's identity crisis to the plight of Mollie Burkhart and other American Indians. However, the comparison does help him convey the sense that white American identity is as fraught as American Indian identity and that neither one had a completely stable presence in Oklahoma at this time.

In the 1920s, the term "orgy" was strongly associated with sin. The term is meant to condemn the industry that had sprung up around exploiting American Indian people. Like an orgy, this industry was all about satisfying appetites. Rather than sex (in most cases), what participants in the "Indian Business" craved was wealth, power, and sometimes a sense of ownership over American Indian people and their bodies. Whereas many white people called themselves legal "guardians" of American Indian people like the Burkharts and claimed to be their protectors, the Indian Rights Association's metaphor pushes back on the idea that guardianship was benevolent. Instead, guardianship and other aspects of the "Indian Business" were ways for white people to steal the money and power they desperately desired. And, for that matter, the mere notion that American Indian people needed "guardians" in the first place was condescending and belittling. 

It is worth noting the Indian Rights Association's choice to use a sexual metaphor to describe the greed embedded in the "Indian Business." For centuries, ever since European colonists arrived in the Americas, American Indian people have been stereotyped as overly sexual beings. They have been accused of violating all kinds of European sexual norms. This false idea that they don't know how to control their bodies or appetites has caused a great deal of pain. For one thing, it has allowed the United States and white people like the Osage "guardians" to justify treating American Indian people as though they are children or even animals in need of supervision. By calling the organized exploitation of the Osage and other American Indians "an orgy," the Indian Rights Association reverses the accusation and suggests that white Americans are the people who can't control their base impulses.

Grann first describes the way Hoover began to see agents as metaphorical "cogs" that could be easily changed out, one for another. He then uses a simile to clarify that for Hoover, this metaphor was coming less from an admiration of machinery than of corporations. Corporations and proponents of capitalism have long used machinery as a metaphor for how employees can work together to efficiently accomplish business goals. The metaphor helps illustrate how the division of labor helps jobs get done faster than they would if one person were to work on every step in the process. By the time Hoover was installed as head of the Bureau of Investigation, mechanical language was entrenched in the way people talked about business. Especially given that some of the most successful businesses at the time were car manufacturers, it makes sense that Hoover talked about workers in this way.

More telling is the fact that Hoover thought of these human cogs as "interchangeable" and that he wanted the agency to function like a large corporation at all. Prior to Hoover, law enforcement did not function as much like a business with profit margins and a single bottom line across the country. Money was certainly part of local law enforcement, with officers taking bribes often enough. However, Hoover sought to consolidate all local law enforcement as a "national force" with a single interest. This idea of a consolidated police force was new, and Hoover borrowed it from the blueprint of corporations like the Ford Motor Company. Just like Ford, Hoover's agency would use an assembly line of workers to enforce Hoover's idea of order across the United States. This new way of doing things was controversial because the United States is a diverse place. People like Tom White weren't sure that it could account for the nuanced reality of different people and places around the country. Still, Hoover more or less got his way. He turned the Bureau of Investigation into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which to this day functions as a massive agency enforcing federal laws all over the country.