Healers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon points to what Jungian psychoanalysis calls the collective shadow. But can we collectively heal this shadow? And, if so, how?
In the opening scene of Martin Scorsese’s brilliant Oscar-nominated Killers of The Flower Moon, set in the American Midwest of the 1920’s, an ecstatic group of Osage people whoop and dance in a fountain of oil as it bursts from their drought-ridden prairie, showering their bodies in black gold. But as the camera pans out, silhouetting the group against the vastness of the land, it looks like they are dripping with blood in a chilling omen of what is to come.
Watch Killers of the Flower Moon trailer
Based on the book by David Grann, the film tells the true story of a murderous plot conceived by white cattleman William ‘King’ Hale (Robert de Niro) to infiltrate the Osage and steal their rights to the oil wealth from their land. Meanwhile, both book and film take their title from a poem by Osage poet Elise Paschen.
Read Wi'-gi-e by Elise Paschen
In Scorsese’s inimitable style Killers of the Flower Moon is a masterful thriller of macrocosmic proportions as told through the microcosm of a personal story – in this case, in an intense love affair between Hale’s nephew, Ernest Buckart (Leonardo di Caprio) and atrocity survivor Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). Against multiple odds, Ernest and Lily fall deeply in love and get married. But of course, there’s a twist and, a horrific one at that. Which is that even as Ernest is learning Osage so he can speak to his wife in her own language and even as he weeps over Molly’s feverish body when she falls ill, he’s stealing out of the house to kill her kinsmen and administering the doctored ‘medicine’ that’s poisoning her to death.
Just how Ernest can simultaneously fall in love with Lily while trying to kill her points to the Jungian concept of the shadow archetype, which symbolises all the guilt, anger and shame that, like the murdered Osage, gets tossed in the dark ditch of the unconscious. In fact, Ernest buries his guilt so successfully that he starts to believe his own lies. But stashed away in that deep, dark ditch, Ernest’s shadow doesn’t go away and the harder he tries to keep his life together, the more it catastrophically falls apart.
But Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t just about the tragic consequences of Ernest’s personal shadow. It’s also about the collective shadow of white supremacy that Jungian analyst and writer Connie Zweig claims:
‘Takes the form of scape-goating, racism or enemy-making… the hypnotic power and contagious nature of these strong emotions are evident in the universal pervasiveness of racial persecution, religious wars and scape-goating tactics around the world. In these ways, human beings attempt to de-humanise others in an effort to ensure they are wearing the white hats – and that killing the enemy doesn’t mean killing human beings like themselves.’
The psychotherapist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialised Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem, describes the collective shadow of white supremacy as the ‘dirty pain’ that ‘blows centuries of white-on-white trauma through millions of Black and red bodies.’ Which illustrates how, although Killers of the Flower Moon is set in the past, the film also speaks to all the ways the shadow of white supremacy continues to violently outsource its collective pain onto black and red and brown bodies in the present.
In her beautifully spare poem Paschen refers to the murder of Anna Kyle Brown as occurring ‘during Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon’. The Farmers’ Almanac name for the May full moon due to the abundance of late Spring flowers which bloom during that month, the origins of the Flower Moon can be traced back to the Algonquin people of Eastern Canada. However, Grann writes that the Osage call this moon the Flower-Killing Moon because May is the time of year they associate with the death of the wildflowers that have blanketed the prairies throughout April.
It seems to me that, in swapping the words ‘Flower Moon’ and ‘Killer’ around, Paschen isn’t only changing their meaning but placing the violent murder of Anna Kyle Brown inside a much larger story. Which is the killing not only of one red-bodied woman by one white-bodied man but the ongoing story about all the ways the legacy of white supremacy is killing indigenous wisdom and its connection to the cycles of the moon and the seasons, to nature and the land.
All of which has been prompting me to ask, what can I do as white-bodied woman to acknowledge my privilege and take responsibility for my pain?
It was with this question in mind that, one drizzly evening in February, I took part in an ancestral landscape healing circle led by grief and death doula Alexandra Grace Derwen in Todmorden where I live. A small town on the border of West Yorkshire and Lancashire that grew out of Industrial Revolution and was once briefly home to the largest cotton mill in the world on the site where the local Morrisons now stands, Derwen (who cites Menakem as an influence) has identified Todmorden as a site of ‘taproot trauma’.
Which is to say, that my damp steep-sided valley surrounded by wind-swept moors strewn with the giant sandstone remains of the glacial melt that sculpted the landscape into being, is the birthplace of the present-day ecological crisis whose most punishing effects are being primarily suffered by… bodies of culture in their billions.
It’s a taproot that runs deep all the way to Todmorden’s complicity in the enslavement of the black bodies who picked the cotton upon which the town wealth was built. Not to mention the white bodies living in the cramped terraces of the valley ‘bottoms’ who were largely treated as mill machinery by the white bodies living in the big houses on the ‘tops’. Although most of the mills have disappeared from the landscape, I see the traces of them everywhere in the thick layers of soot that have turned the buildings black, including my own home.
Coming together with others to acknowledge the inherited trauma in our bodies and landscapes in order to release it from the places where it has become lodged and stuck, like the hundred-years old soot on the bricks of my house, is what Menakem calls ‘clean pain’. In other words, it’s through a recognition of our shared humanity and connection with the land that we get to become healers of the Flower Moon rather than killers.
So, a small circle of local folk came together at dusk in the old Post Office depot in the town centre that’s now home to a progressive green funeral service, to lament the deep rhizome of internal and international trauma rooted in our valley. To the reedy whistle of an owl outside, we closed our eyes as the high-ceilinged depot filled with the low hum of our breath rising up through our bones. With each minute that passed, the humming began to crest until we were immersed in a spectral sea of deep throaty wails and soft, floating moans. Somewhere in the middle, I felt a heaviness in my chest and my eyes began to fill as the sea of sound rose and fell with an increasing intensity. Our collective keening went on like this for ten minutes or so, eventually ebbing away until there was only the echo of a subtle ringing inside my ribs and the lone call of the owl somewhere further out, beckoning the night.
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Creative Experiments
1. Reflect – what are the ways you have been affected by white supremacy in relation to your body, your connection with others and to nature? If you are white-bodied, what are the ways you have benefitted from asymmetric power systems? What privileges have you gained? And at what cost?
2. What is the ancestral landscape of the place where you live now and/or a place you have lived in the past? What are the layers of history? What are the wounds and scars? How does this landscape fit into the world at large? Is there anything in this landscape that particular symbolises these things – i.e trees, a river, a particular plant that’s indigenous to your area or a specific building or landmark? Go to this place and write in response to the feelings, thoughts and sensations that arise as they come up.
3. Taking inspiration from Elise Paschen’s poem (see link in post) write your own lament, beginning with ‘Because…’
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