On the Osage, the 21st century cowboys, and the omission of history..
The one, where I voice myself in Arabic..
Hello again..
in an unconventional fashion, I started the year without the enthusiasm to commit to ‘goals’, and I disappeared all of January from writing.. Not by choice (although it is), but by an all consuming phase at a new job.. Maybe we’ll come to that later.. Anyways, Let’s get to it..
“Let us take another example: We all watch the cowboy movies called “Western” We admire the film’s hero, the cowboy who goes into the wilderness to break into it, who settles there and carries nothing but his pistol. We all know the famous scene, when two cowboys stand in a moment of confrontation in which the one who reaches his gun “faster” than the other wins. This scene, which has been imprinted in our imagination since childhood, teaches us all the foundations of Social Darwinism: that the struggle for survival is the rule of life and that only the fittest, that is, the strongest, the fastest, or the most cunning survives. This is a set of characteristics that have nothing to do with any system, whether religious, moral, or humanitarian. And when the “evil Indians” appear, these “terrorists”, the original owners of the land, who do not leave him alone so that he can graze his cows and build his farm, that is his settlement on their land and the land of their ancestors, the cowboy kills them with his bullets in “defense” of the innocent white girl and his “absolute rights”. We sympathize with him and encourage him, even though this vision is the Zionist vision itself, and he is the same Zionist settler, and we are only the Native Americans who deserve to be exterminated or expelled.”
"ولنضرب مثلأ آخر: كلنا نشاهد أفلام رعاة البقر المسماة “الويسترن”، ونعجب ببطل الفيلم، الكاوبوي الذى يذهب إلى البرية ليفتحها ويستقر فيها ولا يحمل سوى مسدسه. وكلنا يعرف المنظر الشهير، حين يقف اثنان من رعاة البقر فى لحظة المواجهة التى يفوز فيها من يصل إلى مسدسه "أسرع” من الآخر. إن هذا المنظر الذى انطبع في مخيلتنا منذ نعومة أظافرنا، يعلمنا كل أسس الداروينية الاجتماعية: أن الصراع من أجل البقاء هو سنة الحياة وأنه لا يكتب البقاء إلا للأصلح ، أي الأقوى أو الأسرع أو الأكثر دهاء ومكراً، وهى مجموعة من الصفات التي لا علاقة لها بأية منظومة قيمية، دينية كانت أم أخلاقية أم إنسانية. وحينما يظهر الهنود الأشرار، هؤلاء «الإرهابيون» أصحاب الأرض الأصليين الذين لا يتركونه وشأنه كي يرعى أبقاره ويبني مزرعته، أي مستوطنته، على أرضهم وأرض أجدادهم، يحصدهم الكاوبوي برصاصه حصداً "دفاعاً” عن الفتاة البيضاء البريئة وعن حقوقه المطلقة. ونحن نتعاطف معه ونشجعه مع أن هذه الرؤية هى الرؤية الصهيونية بعينها، فشجيع السيما هو المستوطن الصهيوني، وما نحن سوى الهنود الحمر الذين يستحقون الإبادة أو الطرد."
Excerpt from “The World from a Western Perspective”, by Abdelwahab Elmessiri.
A Film. A Great Film.
Killers of the flower moon was the film1 I wanted to watch the most last year. But I didn’t get to see it until last weekend. I was impressed by the film itself. The fact that it was 3.5hrs long and still managed to keep the audiences interested through the master-craft of Scorcese’s work is not unusual.
I have read this past passage I quoted around a month ago, and although I know the analogy (because I read it in other books of Elmessiri), I didn’t stop thinking about it, again. I keep going back to Elmessiri in difficult times because he helps me align my moral compass and worldview.
The film presents the Osage in a civilized but “slightly” ignorant light according to the European/White eye. They have the white accountant that advises them on how to do business, or how to keep their money, and he also knows how to charge them ‘Osage’ prices. This sly outlook is something we have seen so many times in the stereotypical rich Arab Sheikh, who looks offensively comical to any Arab in any movie; not able to speak Arabic properly, one dimensional, and a character without any ‘depth’. Something looking like they belonged to mythical ‘Middle Ages’, showing up in 21st century settings, looking absolutely and intentionally out of place, because the world is not for the Arab, it’s for the West.
The film doesn’t shy away from mentioning the ‘atrocities’ committed against the Osage, but it fails to highlight how the Osage as a nation felt, but goes on to ‘individualize’ the atrocities committed against them (and by extension, against many native nations). Instead, it romanticizes the atrocious history by focusing on the love story embedded within it.
The Omitted Histories.
After watching the film, I kept thinking of how much history have we lost for peoples, nations, ethnicities, and natives of lands that have gotten their histories omitted by the various iterations of settler colonialism.
We have recorded attempts to look into histories of people that have existed, and how people have kept their histories alive through storytelling, songs, tales, and in some cases books.
The history of the Osage, isn’t different from the history of the aboriginals in Australia, and it isn’t also different from the black history in America, or the history of the Palestinian people; they all share the same defining factor which is that for centuries, we saw these histories from the eyes and perspective of the ‘cowboy’ with the ‘absolute rights’. Only now, we’re beginning to see the cracks of the narrative.
Coincidentally (or not so coincidentally), I was reading Wael Hallaq’s2 ‘The Impossible State’, and he mentions in it how history in the eyes of Europeans was there to serve ‘Eurocentric’ history.
Quoting here from a passage at the beginning of the book in which he argues that the ‘universalization’ of ‘Progress’ developed by enlightenment intellectuals so that “the world serves the European perspective”:
Pervading what Scheler has termed the Western thought-structure of domination,63 the idea of progress64 came, in almost all of its vari- ants, to structure history in specifically Eurocentric ways. Condorcet viewed even setbacks in history as instructive “mistakes,” so to speak, which Europe, the highest of all civilizations, could learn to avoid.65 The reader of Condorcet’s famous work on the subject is struck by its tenor, by the overall notion that, for Condorcet (despite his deep commitment to so-called égalité and fraternité), all societies of the past, irrespective of geography or time, lived and died for the sake of, and in preparation for, modern Europe.
This emphasis on the European perspective of history has never been more prevalent, but has never been more challenged throughout history as it is today. The falling of the narrative of enlightenment and ‘civilizing missions’ and the ideas of ‘progress’ and what follows of the claims of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ and all these buzz words has become to the vast majority of the world nothing but empty claims for what’s left of the institutional ‘cowboy’ narrative of the Western movies. The ‘Wild West’ because even the humans that live there with tens of thousands of folktales, histories, lineages, sorrows, and hopes; all these are not worthy of the same level of ‘humanization’ that the ‘innocent girl’ that the Cowboy aims to ‘protect’ in the land of his ‘absolute rights’.
People’s ability to resist the oppression through narrative has been aided by the ability to reach, just as this is an attempt to challenge the narrative of the “Cowboy of storytelling”. We want narratives in which people like the Osage win, in which we support the Native American, or The African rejecting the theft of his diamonds, or the narratives in which the Vietnamese are not terrorists; faceless people shown as savages living in bushes, attacking from under the trees with ‘anger’ in their faces, but heroes presenting us with values that have long gone from the dictionary of the European narrative of history. Values such as sacrifice, courage, dignity, pride in belonging to something bigger than oneself, and standing against oppression.
Rejecting the 20th and 21st century cowboy
In a similar vein, we must reject the “zionist cowboy”, who goes to the land of ‘no people’ only because they’re not people who like like him, and steals their sheep3 and kill the land’s ‘natives’ because he wants to ‘defend’ himself.
The Basque, The Irish, The Maoris, The Zulus, the Navajo, and the natives across the world faced the oppression of the different ‘pioneering’ cowboys across the centuries; all recognize the importance of presenting a narrative in which we do not condone the cowboy of the movies, but present us with the moral case for supporting the ‘Native’.
wrote about how the West has abandoned anything it believes in, adopting 21st century cowboy methods to dominate land, kill its people, subjugate everything that walks on it, and use everything that it holds in its depths, only for the service of ‘Western Imperialism’, in States and Countries acting like institutional cowboys.The Natives everywhere recognize their alienable rights, and refuse to surrender it, and the dignity of your history being remembered in which you die defending your land is more honorable than a history in which you live to tell it and find excuses for you to justify yourself. These aspects are alien to the cowboy, because he started his history through the omission of other peoples and native lands and histories of tens of thousands of years that preceded his ‘enlightenment’.
The generations of Native Peoples do not forget, and their stories are being heard more clearly, more loudly.
History is not being ‘rewritten’, but it is being corrected. This correction has never been stronger.. Long live the correctors of history..
That Said..
I thought the film was a fantastic piece of filmmaking and one of Scorcese’s best works. If you have 3.5hrs, I believe those hours won’t be wasted.
I’ve always been fascinated by the ‘tribal’ history of America, because I myself come from a tribe. From people of unwritten laws and ethics and oral histories and folktales. This film rekindles this flame..
Thank you.
Abdulrahman.
Other Things:
- 🎵: I might have shared my love for post-independence West African national music bands, but this song about Patrice Lumumba is a perfect listen on many levels. As a fan of album covers, this is elite.
- I have been enjoying
use of the Chat feature, in which things are smaller than a full post, but worthy of mentioning/sharing usually end up in his ‘chat’ box. This article from about good conversations is one of these great finds.- I wasn’t inspired enough to take photos enough, but I passed by a photo opportunity and already regretted not taking the photo the moment I passed by the spot, let’s hope I can find the same perfect conditions again.
I use the word film intentionally here. “Avengers” is a movie, “Stalker” by Tarkovsky is a film. It’s a different classification for me.
really great read — I wanted to restack every other line so I just thought I might as well restack the whole piece! It is funny how in movies we do tell stories of resistance against an imperialist oppressor (Star Wars was my first thought)-- but somehow the heroes are still 'white cowboys'... anyway, thanks for writing this Abdulrahman!
Wow. You brought in so much here! and it really is all interlinked. My dad, who grew up in the Soviet Union, was telling me the other day how they were literally taught in school that Siberia was "empty land" before it became part of Russia (not true, obviously). He was telling me about a Russian historian who did a timeline comparison recently of Russian colonization of Siberia, and European states' colonization all over the world and said it was startling to see the parallels.