As director Scorsese seems to have learned over decades of exploring the darkest, most violent aspects of human nature, even as he encounters Molly Burkhart's pain and vulnerability, It may not generate the kind of empathy and remorse for colonialism that Mr. Scorsese hopes to evoke with this film. Pain and weakness may only make the wolf hungrier and more determined.
Mr. Scorsese is taking a different tack. Rather than aiming for the audience's moral development through empathy for the suffering of the Osage, he focuses on Ernest Burkhardt. Ernest is the quintessential wolf, just as Mr. DiCaprio has played other wolves throughout his career, including on Wall Street. Mr. Burkhardt acts on simple and undeveloped moral principles, often not precisely out of malice, but out of self-interest. Even in the intimate context of his own family, he cannot see the “otherness” of his wife and those around her. He is unable to transition from wolf to human because he becomes addicted to self-interest and delusion. Mr. Burkhardt is driven by his vile desires, such as financial gain and other requirements of power, to commit horrific acts against his own family. Killers is a painful movie to watch.
Mr. Scorsese's approach may seem counterintuitive, even off-putting. Because it contradicts the conventional academic wisdom about empathy, Hobbes and Machiavelli notwithstanding. In the fields of political and moral philosophy, it is often assumed that humans are inherently prone to empathy. Hannah Arendt wrote about the need for public spaces where citizens can meet each other directly. Because that face-to-face meeting is fundamental and necessary for developing the shared dignity and equality of democracy. Emmanuel Levinas envisioned human morality to be fully developed only when the individual sees and relates to the “other.” It is in these moments of encountering people with completely different worldviews that we experience empathy and reach our fullest moral potential. It is empathy that moves us from animals – wolves – to humans.
Scholars of Native American history and law, myself included, have often sought to provoke public condemnation of American colonialism by emphasizing the pain and suffering of Native Americans at the hands of the U.S. government and its people. . The moral rectification that Arendt and Levinas envisioned can only begin by forcing the public, the legal academy, and legislators to confront indigenous peoples and other colonized peoples, to see their humanity and feel their suffering. I thought that was enough.
However, this approach has not been successful. The place of colonized peoples like Molly Burkhart and the Osage Nation of Oklahoma in the U.S. Constitution and history continues to come in and out of focus. As indigenous political theorist Vine Deloria Jr. (Dakota) once said, what matters is that Indians and Islanders in colonized countries like Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and American Samoa, at a particular moment in time, to make a cameo appearance. They appear only temporarily, if at all, and are largely sidelined to maintain simple myths of individual liberty, rights, and liberties, hidden behind those myths and ideals, and colonized. There is no understanding of what they did and ultimately what they contributed to larger American society. .